Resilience and Sustainability

Mission 

The mission of the UFTI’s resilience and sustainability research group is to promote multidisciplinary collaboration and explore cross-cutting research while integrating efforts and resources for educating the next generation of leaders and professionals.  

Focus

UFTI’s resilience and sustainability research group brings together researchers with diverse expertise from transportation, coastal, environmental, electrical and mechanical engineering, geography, urban planning, construction management, and computer science. The collective energy and efforts of this research group seek to develop innovative and applicable studies along two tracks: (i) Resilience to both natural disasters and extreme events, in which we focus on developing technologies and analysis to strengthen and support adaptive, robust, and resilient responses for rapid recovery. These include recoveries from various natural disasters – such as hurricanes, tornado, flood, sea-level rise, severe weather, hazards, and other extreme events – pandemics, electronic attacks, and other disruptions of transportation-related systems. (ii) Sustainability, in which we consider topics such as electric vehicles, renewable energy, vehicle emissions, life-cycle costs, e-waste, system design and other related topics. These topics allow us to consider how to balance the needs of the transportation system while also addressing or mitigating concerns related to ecological preservation, economic vitality, and social justice.

The posted projects demonstrate our on-going strength in these topics.

Projects

Project Title	PI	Funding Source
Spatial Explanation and Planning for Resilience of Community-Based Small Businesses to Environmental Shocks.	Yan Wang, Ph.D.; Lili Du, Ph.D.; and Maria Watson, Ph.D.	National Science Foundation
Smart Vehicle Platooning Built upon Real-Time Learning and Distributed Optimization	Lili Du, Ph.D.	National Science Foundation
Sustainable Urban Freight Mobility through Optimization of Logistics Facility Locations	Lili Du, Ph.D.	Freight Mobility Research Institute
Discovering Crises within Crises – Real-Time Detection, Tracking and Visualization of Emergent Crises in Hurricanes	Yan Wang, Ph.D.	National Science Foundation
Examining Digital Vulnerability to Flooding Among Subsidized Housing Residents in Florida	Yan Wang, Ph.D.	Natural Hazards Center-Mitigation Matters Research Program
RAPID: Dynamic Interactions between Human and Information in Complex Online Environments Responding to SARS-COV-2	Yan Wang, Ph.D.	National Science Foundation
Towards Responsive & Resilient Cities: BETerms for Crowdsourcing Perceived Built Environment	Yan Wang, Ph.D.	UF College of Design, Construction and Planning Research Initiative SEED Grant
A framework for modeling flow over flexible submerged aquatic vegetation	Xiao Yu, Ph.D.	National Science Foundation
Modeling Evacuation Behavior in the 2019 Kincade Fire in Sonoma County, California	Xilei Zhao, Ph.D.	Natural Hazards Center
Community-driven evacuation planning and scheduling	Xilei Zhao, Ph.D.	Florida Sea Grant
Project in process	Xiao Yu, Ph.D.	USACE
Global Fellow Program Seed Grant	Yan Wang, Ph.D.	University of Florida International Center

Participants

Research Labs

International Center for Adaption Planning and Design (iAdapt)

In the continued development of climate change, the impacts of sea level rise (SLR) on coastal life are increasing. Many communities, both urban and rural, are suffering from the effects of sunny day flooding, salinity increase, drainage issues, higher risks from storms and surge, and many other challenges. The majority of the global population, including the Unites States, is placed at risk by SLR.  To increase and support the adaptive capacity of vulnerable communities against sea level rise, the Department of Urban & Regional Planning in the College of Design, Planning and Construction at the University of Florida, decided to establish the International Center for Adaptation Planning and Design following a proposal by Dr. Zhong-Ren Peng.

AI+ CASE Lab

The AI+ CASE Lab is led by Dr. Lili Du, Associate Professor at the Department of Civil and Coastal Engineering at the University of Florida. It is dedicated to investigating innovative ideas and solutions for the research problems related to Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Technologies, Network Modeling and Algorithm Design, Data Analysis and Fusion for Traffic Flow Control and Operations. If you are interested in (1) working with, (2) sponsoring, or (3) learning more information about the research group, please feel free to contact us.

Smart, Equitable, Resilient Mobility Systems (SERMOS) Lab

The SERMOS Lab is led by Dr. Xilei Zhao, Assistant Professor in Civil and Coastal Engineering at the University of Florida. Dr. Zhao and her team invent and apply computational and data science methods to create smart, equitable, resilient mobility systems. Her interdisciplinary team is made up of transportation engineers, urban planners, computer scientists, and industrial and operations engineers. Areas of expertise include big data analytics and travel behavior modeling for emerging travel modes (e.g., ridesourcing and micromobility); modeling and planning evacuation; and quantifying resilience for critical infrastructure systems, societal systems, and communities