The Middle Ground: Spatial Planning Under Uncertainty

Conventional spatial planning deals with hazards by bouncing back to the pre-existing situation. Intensifying manifestations of climate risk lead to unforeseen cascading effects that often surpass the level of protection offered by this type of approach (e.g. Hurricane Katrina) . In this thesis. spatial planning approach is developed that...

Hurricane Harvey Report: A fact-finding effort in the direct aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in the Greater Houston Region

On August 25, 2017, Hurricane Harvey made landfall near Rockport, Texas as a Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of approximately 200 km/hour. Harvey caused severe damages in coastal Texas due to extreme winds and storm surge, but will go down in history for record-setting rainfall totals and flood-related damages. Across large...

Multidisciplinary emergency management: A comparative study of coordination and performance of on-scene command teams in virtual reality exercises

Structural vulnerability analysis of electric power distribution grids

Power grid outages cause huge economical and societal costs. Disruptions in the power distribution grid are responsible for a significant fraction of electric power unavailability to customers. The impact of extreme weather conditions, continuously increasing demand, and the over-ageing of assets in the grid, deteriorates the safety of...

Networked reliability: Institutional fragmentation and the reliability of service provision in critical infrastructures

Critical Infrastructures are the arteries and veins of Western, urbanized societies. The services and products provided by these large-scale, complex systems are considered essential. However, in recent years, more and more new problems seem to crop op after these infrastructures were opened up to market forces. What has happened in these...

MEDUSA: Survivable information security in critical infrastructures