Resilience of UK's future energy and transport infrastructure to natural and malicious threats

In October 2010, the University of Southampton was awarded over £1.4million by the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) under its "Sustainable Energy Networks", "Transportation Operations and Management", and "Information and Knowledge Management" initiatives to carry out a 3 year multidisciplinary research project considering "the future developments in the UK's energy and transport infrastructure and the resilience of these systems to natural and malicious threats and hazards".

A strategic tool to help predicting the resilience of future transport and energy networks

The R-Futures programme Aims:

• To identify the resilience implications of infrastructural decision making on a 2030/2050 timescale.
• To develop relevant and compelling future scenarios and hazard episodes as a context for analysis.
• To avoid an artificially segregated analysis by engaging diverse stakeholders to characterise and address:
  • the horizontal cross-sectoral interdependencies between relevant infrastructures and agencies,
  • the vertical interplay between micro, meso and macro layers of agencies and infrastructures.
• To model the relevant socio-technological systems in order to capture the key causal relationships.
• To build a fully interactive demonstrator system that operationalises resilience for key stakeholders.

A project built and improved following a cyclical methodology

The R-Futures project will be built and refined iteratively by:

• gathering expert opinion
• formulating future scenarios
• building an interactive simulation of inter-dependent infrastructure subject to critical hazard events
• deploying this simulation as a tool to achieve transformative learning in stakeholders & decision makers