Board 16: Work in Progress: Design of “Risk and Resilience” Focused Courses for Undergraduate Engineering Education Towards a Hazard-Resilient Built Environment

In the last few decades, there has been a significant increase in the number and magnitude of natural and man-made hazards, which imposes a tremendous risk to the built environment. In response to the urgent needs for engineering professionals to address these hazards and improve the resilience of our built environment, it is critical to develop a workforce with risk and resilience skills to meet the increasing demand for managing disaster-resilient built environment. This paper presents our work in progress to develop and integrate a set of “risk and resilience” focused courses into engineering education for workforce towards a hazard-resilient built environment. A set of three individual courses, namely, 1) Introduction to Risk and Resiliency in Engineering, 2) Reliability and Optimization Methods in Engineering, 3) Sensing and Data Analytics for Infrastructure Systems will be developed and incorporated into curriculum. These three courses have been designed to be help address the fundamental knowledge and techniques needed for engineers to conduct the assessment, design and management of engineering systems to achieve hazard resilience. The paper provides details about the rational and course objectives, course components, and sample course projects for design and development of these courses. The developed courses can provide useful reference for others institutions to design and implement risk and resilience related courses in the civil engineering curriculum. Introduction and Background The past few decades have witnessed a significant increase in the number and magnitude of natural and man-made hazards, including Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion in 2010, Christchurch Earthquakes in 2011, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Oso Washington Landslide in 2014, Hurricanes Irma and Harvey in 2017, which have caused not only significant damages to the built environment but also heightened levels of risk to lives and property. For example, during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the storm overwhelmed the levee system and flooded 80% of New Orleans, caused about 1300 deaths and a total loss of $40 to $50 billion [1]. Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion in 2010 caused 11 deaths and created the largest environmental disaster in the United States history. In 2011, the earthquakes in Christchurch New Zealand caused over $30 billion of damages and 185 deaths. Disaster-related losses in the U.S. have exceeded $57 billion annually on average (and growing), and impose a tremendous threat to the welfare and security of the society [2]. Disaster resilience has become a priority of national needs to improve the performance of existing aging infrastructures and create smarter infrastructure systems to protect vital lifelines that help recover after a disaster and plan for future events [3]. Risk management and resilience are critical for planning, design, operation and maintenance of a variety of engineering systems for the built environment in the United States, including buildings, transportation, energy, water and food systems. For example, one of the prime lessons from Hurricane Sandy in 2012 was that we should design resilient infrastructure systems to ensure the adaptability for the future [4]. Currently, the importance of risk and resilience of engineering systems is increasingly appreciated in professional practice and research, yet these concepts continue to be absent from most traditional engineering curricula. Recent disasters and extreme events have further highlighted the need to produce engineering graduates with multi-disciplinary backgrounds and unique holistic perspectives and expertise to assess the risks and improve the resilience of our engineering systems through their life span. Indeed, the ASCE Vision for Civil Engineering in 2025 [5] portends a future in which engineers will be leaders in assessing and managing risk in all phases of their work toward hazard resilient built environment. In response to the urgent needs for engineering professionals to address the increasing frequency of hazards and improve the resilience of our built environment, it is desirable to enrich the current curriculum of civil engineering and develop new courses to engage undergraduate engineering students in designing and constructing hazard-resilient engineering systems for the built environment. This paper presents our work in progress to infuse civil engineering and related engineering programs with transformative risk and resilience concepts via developing a set of “risk and resilience” focused courses. The developed courses will bridge the gap between existing civil engineering curriculum and the industry and societal needs for the new generation workforce. The “risk and resilience” focused courses include three courses: 1) Introduction to Risk and Resiliency in Engineering, 2) Reliability and Optimization Methods in Engineering, 3) Sensing and Data Analytics for Infrastructure Systems. The course “Introduction to Risk and Resiliency in Engineering” is currently being offered to our undergraduate students in Spring 2019. The other two courses will be offered in the semesters of Fall 2019 and Spring 2020, respectively. Overview of Risk and Resiliency Focused Courses The three developed courses are independent but complementary courses. These courses are integrated parts that address the fundamental knowledge and techniques needed for engineers to conduct the assessment, design and management of engineering systems to achieve hazard resilience, as illustrated in Figure 1. The “Introduction to Risk and Resiliency in Engineering” course (Course 1) will introduce natural and man-made hazards faced by engineering infrastructure and provide a comprehensive overview about the basic definition and engineering principles for risk and resilience assessment of various engineering systems. The “Reliability and Optimization Methods in Engineering” course (Course 2) will provide a general survey of the complete field of Reliability and Optimization in various engineering applications, and the course is designed to give a thorough philosophical base for Reliability and Optimization in engineering and mathematical techniques used along with frequent examples of application for engineering structures, components and systems. The “Sensing and Data Analytics for Infrastructure Systems” course (Course 3) will introduce the sensing and data analytics techniques across a broad range of engineering disciplines with a focus on infrastructure systems, and the course will empower students with a basic skill set on sensing and data analytics and an ability to directly apply these tools for practical engineering problems. These three courses are being taught in a collaborative effort by all authors listed in this paper. For each course, a principal instructor is in charge of the overall management of the course and instruction of its main components. However, other instructors will teach one lecture about applications of this course in their area of expertise, since these topics are multi-disciplinary in nature. These three courses have been included in the civil engineering curriculum as technical elective courses that are offered to undergraduate students during the junior and senior years. Collaborative class project will be incorporated into each course, which has been demonstrated as an effective approach to enhance students’ engagement and self-efficacy [6-9]. We are currently implementing an evaluation plan for these three courses to assess the effects of collaborative class projects on the students’ self-efficacy. Figure 1. Overview of three developed risk and resilience focused courses The following sections of this paper will discuss about details of each of these three developed courses including the rational and course objectives, course components, and sample course projects. Introduction to Risk and Resiliency in Engineering Course Information Rationale and Objective: The severe impacts of recent natural and man-made disasters have highlighted the importance of risk and resilience assessment of engineering systems, which are critical infrastructures to ensure public health, safety, security, and commerce. According to the Vision for Civil Engineering in 2025 [5], civil engineers should serve competently, collaboratively, and ethically to manage risk and uncertainty caused by natural events, accidents and other threats. The future development and the preservation and maintenance of national infrastructure will demand a more intense focus on risk assessment to mitigate hazards and improve engineering performance [10]. Understanding, managing, and reducing disaster risks provide a foundation for resilience against disasters. Resilience analysis is a proactive approach to enhance the ability of the infrastructure systems to prevent damages before the disturbance events (e.g., natural hazards), Risk and Resilience Informed Engineering Design and Management for Built Environment Course 1: Understand how engineering systems react to multiple hazards Course 2: Master decision making and optimization tools for engineering design & management Course 3: Learn how to assess the existing condition of infrastructures by learning from sensing data mitigate the losses during the events and improve recovery capability after the events [11]. This course aims to expose and prepare new generation of engineers with the fundamental principles of risk and resilience thinking for holistic design and management of engineering systems. The course will inform and empower students with in-depth, state-of-the-art knowledge on risk and resilience for real-world engineering applications [4, 12-15]. Learning Outcomes: After taking this course, the students will have a basic understanding of the natural and man-made disasters and their impacts on engineering systems. Students will be familiar with the risk and resilience concept, and the commo