In January 2019, the Resilience Shift’s Technical Advisory Group is headed to the United States of America’s West Coast to continue the Resilience Shift round-table series, working in collaboration with the University of California Berkeley, the Centre for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), and Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Centre (PEER).
The primary focus of this round-table is on advances in city-scale modelling and simulation.
We are bringing together invited practitioners (including utility owners and resilience planners) along with leading academics on system modelling to develop a shared understanding of advances in sophisticated city-scale models and their applications in supporting infrastructure resilience. The advancements in modelling will be explored specifically within the context of how these models can help infrastructure planning and management and to identify foreseeable practical applications.
Resilience Shift round-tables bring together people who would not necessarily otherwise meet as a group to discuss their sector’s resilience. This helps to facilitate cross-disciplinary discussion – an activity that is often overlooked, yet it can be invaluable for reflection and learning. For this round-table, all participants have an interest in resilience management and advancing analytical capability to support the flow of information to inform decisions.
City-scale simulations are becoming possible thanks to a surge of development in the high-performance computing (HPC) domain including advanced hardware, computational and algorithmic techniques. Advanced HPC systems are now starting to become available for city-scale simulations with micro-scale models of an individual objective (structure, people, vehicle, etc).
In practice, there can be a mismatch between what is technically possible and the reality of what is useful, given constraints such as a lack of consistency in data, data processing resources, or platform management. There are also political and social implications that influence how knowledge gained from system modelling might influence the decision-making process.
This round-table will serve to illuminate key issues and identify how they might be overcome, helping to further inform the work of the Resilience Shift. If you would like to find out more about this work, you can email us or follow our Twitter feed.
