The Civil Engineering Division at the Department of Engineering has been successful in its bid for a Centre for Doctoral Training in Future Infrastructure and Built Environment: Resilience in a Changing World.
This funding is testament to our world-class training and research in infrastructure, to the highly talented students that we attract, and to our inspirational research environment that is second to none.
Professor Abir Al-Tabbaa
This expands and builds on the strength of the current Centre for Doctoral Training in Future Infrastructure and Built Environment (FIBE CDT) to address the wider remit of resilient infrastructure.
The FIBE2 CDT will lead the transformation in the resilience of our infrastructure through the creation of an inspirational doctoral training programme for talented cohorts from diverse academic and social backgrounds to conduct world-class, cutting-edge industry-relevant research. The goal is to develop the infrastructure professionals of the future, equipped with a versatile and cross-disciplinary skill set to meet the most complex emerging challenges and contribute effectively to better infrastructure decision-making in the UK.
The Centre will provide more than 60 fully funded PhD students over the next five years. The £6.5m funding from EPSRC is supported by £12.5m funding from 27 industry partners and involves collaboration with nine international academic centres around the world.
The Centre will tackle the strategically important area of infrastructure resilience in the context of five categories of threats and associated opportunities:
1. Infrastructure resilience against technological uncertainty
Flexibility against rapid pace of disruptive technological change, reduction of technology life cycle duration, unpredictability caused by huge disparity between infrastructure and technology life cycles, harnessing future unknown technologies to increase resilience, protecting against their drawbacks (e.g. cyberattacks, legacy data) and the increasing interdependencies between physical and digital infrastructure.
2. Infrastructure resilience against environmental causes
Protection against physical deterioration (e.g. corrosion, fatigue), natural hazards (e.g. earthquakes, tsunamis, mudslides, flooding), increased waste and pollution and depleted natural resources, impacts of climate change in both short-term (e.g. flash flooding, fires, droughts) and long-term (rising sea levels, increase in extreme weather) and the interaction between infrastructure and the environment ecosystem.
3. Infrastructure resilience in a world of economic and political change
Minimising infrastructure construction and maintenance costs, while maintaining the ability to respond to other threats, protection against costly maintenance/renewal through whole-life costing for infrastructure investment, managing affordability constraints, the use of limited resources to fulfil unlimited demand, delivery of infrastructure for a circular economy, and the repurposing of infrastructure.
4. Infrastructure resilience to support urbanisation and demographic change
Infrastructure fit for increasing populations, blue-green infrastructure, clean air, energy consumption, resilience against capacity changes, and decarbonisation of the built environment.
5. Infrastructure resilience in a changing society and culture
Management of increased societal demands and expectations, enhanced wellbeing-infrastructure interaction, increased societal and stakeholder involvement in infrastructure planning, and change of culture within the construction industry.
Cross-disciplinary within the cohorts, training and research is a major feature of the FIBE2 CDT. It builds on the wider interconnected training and research agenda across the whole department, and interconnected research on infrastructure across the whole University.
