SUSpENsE - Sustainable built environment under natural hazards and extreme events

Title: SUSpENsE - Sustainable built environment under natural hazards and extreme events

Coordinators at INESCC: Carlos Henggeler (coord. Linha 4)

Dates start/end: 1-2017 / 12-2020

Entity: Programas Integrados de IC&DT, CENTRO-45-2015-1, Programa Operacional do Centro, Portugal 2020

Project Code: CENTRO-45-2015-1

Synopsis:

Sustainable development constitutes the ultimate challenge for humankind in view of these irreversible climate changes. The built environment is one of the pillars of development as it provides many essential functions for human kind to prosper and survive, such as shelters and the infrastructure for all economic activity. 

This integrated R&D programme proposes to address these problems in a holistic and multi-disciplinary way. It must implement more efficient solutions to satisfy the social requirements (social dimension of sustainability) that are feasible from an economic viewpoint (economic dimension) and greatly reduce the environmental impacts (ecological dimension) with appropriate levels of safety.

Four main focus areas of intervention are defined:

• Sustainable exploitation of sea resources.
• Effective implementation of industrialized construction practices.
• Development of efficient solutions for aquatic ecosystems environmental monitoring, quality assessment, and management.
• Addressing the major problems of growing urbanization with intensive use of technological solutions and distributed decision support tools to make cities smarter regarding the usage of energy and the offering of innovative mobility systems: Smart Cities.

The research strand on smart cities led by INESC Coimbra is devoted to modelling problems arising in urban contexts, namely dealing with the promotion of efficiency in energy usage in (residential and public) buildings and mobility services, including data integration, demand/supply analysis, and quality of service assessment. Research should lead to designing and developing new integrative methodologies to foster efficiency in the use of resources and effectiveness in the provision of services. 

A foremost challenge to be addressed consists in the integrated design and development of energy and mobility efficiency solutions driven by rich data arising from multiple sources in a (time and space) dynamic context. For this purpose, innovative urban systems modelling tools are needed capable of encompassing multiple, conflicting and incommensurate axes of evaluation of different policies, namely based on system dynamics and operations research tools. Moreover, novel urban “big data” methodologies should be envisioned regarding data representation, collection and processing at diverse temporal and spatial scales in the scope of decision support tools. The aim is empowering citizens regarding the rational use of energy and mobility issues, making a judicious balance between all pillars of sustainability at the urban scale. Particular emphasis will be given to the emergence of new “green” business models, namely those offering customized services.

The integrated use of all energy resources, including local distributed renewable generation and flexible demand, should be optimized and articulated with innovative mobility services to contribute to “net-zero energy” cities. Special attention will be devoted to the role of smart campuses within smart cities. In this scope campuses can serve as a test bed to study solutions for interoperability, scalability and replicability in different scenarios.