| KEYWORD |
Heuristic Approaches for the Robust Optimization of the Resilience of Energy Critical Infrastructures (ECI) Exposed to Extreme Natural Hazards
Parole chiave CLIMATE CHANGE RESILIENCE, CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURES PROTECTION, ENERGY CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE, HEURISTIC OPTIMIZATION, NATURAL HAZARDS, OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHMS, RESILIENCE, RESILIENCE-BASED DESIGN, ROBUST DESIGN, ROBUST OPTIMIZATION
Riferimenti NICOLA PEDRONI
Gruppi di ricerca Nemo
Descrizione Context:
Modern society depends on critical lifelines, like electric power and natural gas, telephone and other communication systems, water, wastewater and transportation systems. Many of these infrastructures are aging and are exposed to different natural hazards (e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and floods), whose intensity and severity has been increasing in the past years, possibly due to climate change. Resilience has become a relevant attribute to consider in the design for the management of any infrastructure, for ensuring the capability of withstanding disruptive events and recovering performance.
Scenario simulation plays a key role for analyzing resilience and informing investments on prevention, mitigation and recovery. However, it becomes computationally demanding when exploring the response of the complex Critical Infrastructures (CI) under uncertain disruptive events. In this view, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), stochastic simulation and heuristic optimization methods can be combined for simulating efficiently and optimizing the response of an infrastructure exposed to a disruptive event, under uncertain operational and environmental conditions.
Activities:
Within this general framework, we will focus on the Energy Critical Infrastructures (ECI) for their pivotal role in supporting other infrastructures and society as a whole, in a scenario of energy transition. The main activities of the MSc student will be the following:
- carry out a synthetic literature review about the problem of resilience (optimization) in Energy Critical Infrastructures (ECIs);
- develop advanced heuristic methods for the robust optimization of the resilience of ECIs in the presence of extreme natural events, under uncertain operational and environmental conditions (e.g., an earthquake and/or a tsunami). Two frameworks should be considered: i) identification of strategies and actions to optimize the post-disruption recovery process (i.e., the resilience) of a given ECI design; ii) re-design some features of the ECI to optimize pre-disruption system resilience capabilities (i.e., carry out a resilience-based design of the ECI).
- apply the developed method to an Integrated Energy System (combining a Gas Turbine Plant, a Nuclear Power Plant, and a Wind Farm), whose model can be made available to the student.
Vedi anche resilience_eci_robustoptimization - 3.pdf
Note Duration of the thesis
Around 6-8 months (anyway, this aspect can/should be discussed)
Scadenza validita proposta 31/12/2025
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