Hurricane Resilient City

A conceptual hurricane-resilient city diagram.

This study focuses on the short-term efforts to systematically advance hurricane resilience of urban built environment, where the problem of optimizing stakeholders’ action plans for resilience enhancement is mathematically formulated as a Markov decision process and approached by the deep reinforcement learning (AI) algorithms.

Project description

A city resilient to hurricanes would not break but will bend from their associated hazards (e.g., wind, rain and surge). This city bending and bouncing back (to some extent) result in increasingly significant losses due to the intensified hurricane wind-rain-surge extremes under changing climate and the continued escalation of coastal population density. Therefore, both long-term efforts (e.g., hurricane mitigation and climate adaptation) and short-term efforts (e.g., pre-hurricane preparedness, during-hurricane response and post-hurricane repair) are urgently needed to enhance city resilience by collectively improving the ability of a city to adapt to changing conditions, and to withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions caused by hurricane hazards. This study focuses on the short-term efforts to systematically advance hurricane resilience of urban built environment, where the problem of optimizing stakeholders’ action plans for resilience enhancement is mathematically formulated as a Markov decision process and approached by the deep reinforcement learning (AI) algorithms.

Project outcome

Posters, conference presentations and journal articles

Project details

Timing, eligibility and other details
Length of commitment Longer than a semester; (6-9 months)
Start time Anytime  
In-person, remote, or hybrid? Hybrid
Level of collaboration Small group project (2-3 students)
Benefits Research experience, academic credit, work study
Who is eligible Sophomores, juniors and seniors

Project mentor

Teng Wu

Associate Professor

Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering

Phone: (716) 645-5152

Email: tengwu@buffalo.edu

Start the project

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Preparation activities

The specific preparation activities for this project will be customized through discussions between you and your project mentor. Please be sure to ask them for the instructions to complete the required preparation activities.

Keywords

resilience, infrastructure, hurricane, hazard, city, civil engineering, artificial intelligence