The next EPICentre Seminar will take place on the 11th April 2014 at 1pm in room 102 (the 1st floor classroom) Chadwick Building. The Seminar will be given by Dr Sean Wilkinson of Newcastle University and will be on: “Increasing Community Resilience and Prosperity through the Provision of Critical Infrastructure”. Please find below the synopsis of the talk. As usual, EPICentre Seminars are free to attend, open to all, and no registration is necessary. Please also feel free to bring along your own lunch. Best wishes Tiziana Synopsis: Increasing Community Resilience and Prosperity through the Provision of Critical Infrastructure Infrastructure systems have an important role to play in both protecting communities from hazard and providing economic prosperity. While catastrophic failure of these systems is rare, recent natural disasters, such as the earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan (2011), the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano (2010) and Hurricane Katrina (2005), have highlighted not only the importance of Critical Infrastructure (CI) systems to modern daily life but also the disproportionate effect that failure of these systems can have on our communities. In this seminar, it will be demonstrated that infrastructure networks naturally configure themselves to particular architectures and that given the correct set of circumstances these architectures can lead to systems that are vulnerable to certain hazards. It presents as a case study the European air traffic network and the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano and shows why this had such a devastating effect on European travel. It also presents some very recent work which suggests we may be able to model how our infrastructure networks grow and in so doing better understand their role in providing our communities with economic prosperity. Sean Wilkinson is a senior lecturer in the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences at Newcastle University. He is currently sponsored by EPSRC to conduct reconnaissance missions to areas that have recently experienced earthquakes with the aim of understanding how buildings and infrastructure respond to these events. He is also working on the RESNET which is assessing how resilient the future electricity transmission network may be to future climate. His most recent research has been using network graph theory to try and better understand how to improve the resilience of critical infrastructure and it is some of this work that he will be presenting.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 08:10:09 +0000
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