Hurricane Resilient City
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
| 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
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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