Research

Vision: Ensuring efficient system functionality in the face of any crisis

To successfully use and implement existing as well as new sustainable technologies and solutions, they must also offer a certain level of resilience.

Only if the solutions are able to withstand shocks and crises, and to recover quickly from them, a successful and ultimately sustainable implementation can be guaranteed.

Resilience is a key property of a system to successfully deal with crisis-related shocks and maintaining the ongoing function of systems. To this end, resilience systematically considers all aspects before, during and after a crisis with the goal of emerging from the crisis stronger.

In this context, the imperative to actually quantify resilience derives from the competing trends of increased efficiency while demanding increased robustness and fault tolerance. Moreover, incentivizing resilience can only be successful in the long term if one can measure the "return of investment."

This is where the research of the professorship "Resilience Engineering for Technical Systems" comes in, by making the resilience of complex socio-technical can be quantified on a strategic level. In addition, methods, measures and technologies are developed on this basis in order to be able to increase resilience efficiently.

How can applied resilience engineering preserve the security of societal life and its assets and ensure the continuity of critical functions through enhanced resistance and recovery capabilities?

• Quantification and visualization of resilience

Development of metrics that lead to quantitative measures for resilience and its change in complex, multidimensional systems.

• Full-physics, cross-scale numerical simulation methods

Modeling and analysis of complex systems at high accuracy and detail at the various scales from components to objects and all the way up to entire networks and their interconnections.

• Resilience-specific monitoring concepts

Development of methods to capture the state of structures, the stressors acting on them, and their effects, including integration into simulation environments.

• Technical-physical solutions to increase resilience

Development of new robust and resilient structural elements using approaches from biological transformation.