NZSEE Wellington Seminar – Intersection of Risk, Reliability, and Resilienc

Presenter:

Liz Varga is Professor of Complex Systems in the Civil, Environmental, and Geomatics Engineering Department of University College London (UCL) where she leads the Infrastructure Systems Institute. She was awarded Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in the King’s birthday honours (June 2024) for services to critical infrastructure. Prof Varga teaches, writes, and advises globally on energy, transport, digital communications, water, and waste systems. Her key research themes include infrastructure resilience, sustainable innovation, and decarbonisation. She uses digital methods including digital twins, computational ontologies, and AI and she is a member of the governing board of the Data and Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure. She is a commissioner with the National Preparedness Commission and the project manager for a new international standard ISO 22372 on infrastructure resilience. She is director of UKCRIC Services Limited, and an Executive of UKCRIC a 15 university collaboration for Research in Infrastructure and Cities.

Seminar Overview:

Risk has become a well-established discipline in both public and private sectors. Risk standards, processes, methods, data sources, and roles in organizations are focused on consequences of being unable to handle disruptions. Meanwhile reliability has focused on the quality of an organisation’s assets to reduce unacceptable interruptions. The discipline of asset management and increasingly the use of strategies, methods and techniques from reliability engineering, are improving the operational reliability of engineering systems and mitigating risks identified in risk assessment.

Although the field of resilience is long-lived, the discipline itself is not very well established. Its focus is the continuity of services by absorbing and adapting to hazards and threats. It needs the insights from risk and reliability engineering but is broader in scope. Resilience recommends proactive action to minimize harm and cost by using insights from data science, from scenario modeling, from digital tools/algorithms, etc. The need for collaboration and data sharing across organisations is a prerequisite for timely and least cost interventions. This has profound implications for organisations whose ambitions include resilience, and for the myriad of stakeholders in government, investment, digital solution providers, etc. who will benefit from the field of resilience.

Join us for an insightful evening of learning and discussion with leading international expertise.

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