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Resilience is the capacity to withstand, prepare for, recover from, and adapt following disruption. It is a central tenet of the Sustainable Development Goals, from safe settlements and built structures to the secure supply of energy, water and food. This Collection from Communications Engineering presents News, Comment, Analysis and Research exploring various ways in which engineering researchers are engaging with the challenge of building and maintaining resilient infrastructure. Themes include (but are not limited to) built environment, energy, communications, transport networks and water.
Today we present a special issue of Communications Engineering exploring various ways in which engineering researchers are engaging with the challenge of building resilient infrastructure for a sustainable future.
The climate crisis, the Covid pandemic and rapid urban growth amongst other factors are leaving populations increasingly vulnerable to breakdown in key infrastructure systems. This includes the built structures that form our living and working environment, the transport and communications networks that serve us and the utilities that enable us to live comfortably.
Alessandro F. Rotta Loria explores the impact of subsurface urban heat islands on ground deformations as well as civil infrastructure performance. The results provide a meaningful reference to take account of rising ground temperatures for future civil construction design.
Thomas Matarazzo and colleagues determine modal frequencies of a suspension bridge and highway bridge from analysis of smartphone datasets during vehicle trips across the bridge. The field results suggest that data from both controlled and uncontrolled crowdsourced smartphone datasets have value in monitoring transportation infrastructure.
Building retrofit is essential to deliver decarbonisation. But its implementation could leave a legacy of waste if end of life is not considered now. Danielle Densley Tingley considers the challenges and implications of embedding circularity into building retrofit.
Findings from a recent publication in Energy and Buildings show that “net-zero energy” renovations can lead to net-positive energy buildings. But the results also raise concerns for the energy grid and overheating in the summer. The analysis of energy consumption of residential buildings give insight into future performance of a Dutch neighborhood’s deep energy-saving refurbishments.
Malcolm White and colleagues apply a lightweight interpretable machine learning framework, FastMapSVM to the classification of seismograms. The authors demonstrate that the approach outperforms neural network alternatives when train data or time is limited.
Numerical tools for flood forecasting and for designing coastal protection schemes require accurate real world data on speed and volume of overtopping waves on sea walls. Margaret Yelland and colleagues here describe the validation and field deployment of arrays of capacitance sensors, termed Wirewall, as a tool for acquisition of detailed data of coastal overtopping.
Land subsidence adds to the problem of climate-driven sea-level rise in coastal regions. A recent publication in Nature Sustainability has quantified the relative rates of local land subsidence of 48 major coastal cities worldwide. The study found that relative local land subsidence is more spatially variable than IPCC estimates previously suggested, with cities in Asia suffering the most. The findings could refine predictions of relative sea level rise and better guide actions for planning, designing and implementing protection strategies for coastal cities.
Data-Driven Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm for Power Systems Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithms can enhance the monitoring, operation, and control of Distributed Energy Resources. Li and coworkers reduce the computational effort required for training these algorithms by efficiently obtaining algorithm parameters.
In a recent work published in NatureCommunications, Dr. Benjamin Schäfer and colleagues demonstrate the effect of Braess’ paradox in power grids, both in a lab-scale mimic and through real-world simulations of the German power network. The results lay the groundwork for more sustainable grid development.