Resilient Societies and Interdependent Infrastructures

Networks are ubiquitous in our modern vocabulary. From social media to transportation and resource distribution networks, they are the fabric of the interdependent infrastructures we rely on to navigate the complexities of our daily lives. Our work streamlines network analysis, offering effective tools to assist policymakers as they grapple with the most pressing issues: How does a city recover from a natural disaster? How does climate change impact society? How can we best fight infectious disease outbreaks? The versatile tools we have developed interpret, forecast, and explain the dynamics of massively interacting systems.

One of our team’s core competencies is the modeling and simulation of socially-coupled physical infrastructures that are complex and networked. We use high-resolution scalable models and an interaction-based computer modeling and simulation approach to study interdependencies among societal infrastructures. Examples of these systems include urban regional transportation systems, national electrical power markets and grids, communication systems, and the internet. These systems consist of large numbers of interacting physical, technological, informational, and human components whose global system properties are a result of interactions among local system elements. The computational methods allow our researchers to specify, design, and analyze simulations of extremely large systems and implement them on massively parallel architectures.

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