CEE Distinguished Speaker Seminar

"Optimizing Investments in Transportation and other Critical Infrastructure Systems Protection"

Abstract:
Secure and functioning transportation and other critical civil infrastructure systems are of paramount importance to society. To ensure that effective services can be provided under changing, disrupted or extreme conditions, agencies charged with managing and operating these systems must invest in measures that safeguard their performance. Decisions to invest needed capital and accept the opportunity costs of directing funds to protection in place of other community needs involve tradeoffs in effective use of limited resources and risk levels. This lecture will describe developed optimization, real options and machine learning approaches designed for supporting such protective investment decisions. These techniques address inherent uncertainties in future conditions arising from one-time to episodic events, the role of humans in infrastructure service capacity, operational conditions of extreme environments, and the effects of dependencies and interdependencies across multiple, interacting civil infrastructure lifeline systems.

Bio:
Dr. Elise Miller-Hooks holds the Bill and Eleanor Hazel Endowed Chair in Infrastructure Engineering and is the Department Chair of the Sid & Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering at George Mason University. She has served as an advisor to the World Bank Group, is a member of the Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine, and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier’s Sustainability Analytics and Modeling journal. Prior to her appointment at Mason, Dr. Miller-Hooks served as a program director at the U.S. National Science Foundation and on the faculties of the University of Maryland, Pennsylvania State University and Duke University. Dr. Miller-Hooks received her Ph.D. (1997) and M.S. (1994) degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas – Austin (a CAEE Academy of Distinguished Alumni member) and B.S. in Civil Engineering from Lafayette College (1992).