This award supports a workshop, to be held in 2014, to identify research directions to enable resilient buildings and other civil infrastructure for sustainable communities. This workshop will engage research communities, such as engineering, urban planning, architecture, engineered materials, systems design, and social sciences, to identify research priorities for making such infrastructure both resilient and sustainable for communities. Much of our nation's civil infrastructure will experience significant loss of function, operations, and/or integrity due to aging, high demands for services, and different natural and technological hazards. Furthermore, current practice in the design, construction, use, operations, maintenance, and deconstruction of this civil infrastructure is economically and environmentally unsustainable. This workshop will close the gaps in knowledge of these problems by reviewing existing knowledge and identifying potential research directions and research tools needed to put these research ideas to work.
The broader impact of this workshop is the creation of a research agenda that can lead to innovations in designing, constructing and maintaining buildings and other civil infrastructure to be both resilient and sustainable, thus potentially yielding savings in cost, energy, materials, and other natural resources. The workshop will consider how existing and new research tools can be harnessed to improve and expand research and technology transfer. By setting this research agenda, this workshop will catalyze research for resilient and sustainable civil infrastructure to benefit the nation's welfare.
