Technological transformations in the area of critical infrastructures, such as those emerging with the energy and mobility transition, are accompanied by an increase of digitization and interconnectivity, but also by an increase of the vulnerability potential of important supply systems (e.g. cyber-attacks).

Systemic risks in the provision of resources, as is the case in a decentralized energy system based on renewable energies (e.g. component failure, volatile feed-in), also threaten supply security.

The above-mentioned aspects together with the fact that developments and dynamics in demand

• for energy - e.g. drastic increase in power demand due to climate change (cooling in summer) or due to the spread of new power consumers (e-mobility)
• but also for transport capacities - e.g. due to a continuous increase of inter-urban transport demand (commercial transport),

are difficult to predict. Thus, uncertainties regarding the reliability and resilience of future supply systems are growing.

In order to support sustainability developments in the long term, security of supply must be reassessed against the background of changing boundary conditions in the context of the necessary technological transformations of critical sectors.

Since critical services increasingly depend on a reliable supply of electricity and information (Smart City), individual disruptions or interruptions in supply can have devastating effects on the security of supply of an urban area.

Our research investigates degrees of freedom in the design of critical infrastructures (e.g. supply networks) and in the area of robust and dynamic measure development with the aim of improving the resilience of individual infrastructures or infrastructure systems. In this context, AI-based concepts, methods and algorithms are developed for the following main topics:

• Planning and (real-time) operation of resilient and adaptive (smart) critical infrastructures and supply networks - in particular smart energy systems, water supply and transport systems (motorways) are considered.
• Dynamic decision support in crisis management - here methods for the multi-criteria development of robust and coordinated measures including different critical infrastructures such as health care systems, power and water supply (urban resilience) are investigated.

Contacts

Network:

• CEDIM
• ESReDA
• EERA JP SG

Projects:

• SECURITY2People
• RIKOV
• DAMAST

Courses:

Vorlesung WS2020/21

"Resilience Thinking in Urban and Regional Planning - 'sustainable' Integration of Sustainable Energy Technologies"