Disaster REsilience Assessment, Modelling, and INnovation Singapore

Climate change has increased the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, with severe consequences on urban infrastructure, especially in Southeast Asia (SEA), where densely populated urban areas and a lack of resources and clear guidelines aggravate the problem.

Although flood management planning has enabled Singapore to minimise human casualties and property losses in recent floods, the consequences have been more severe in neighbouring countries. The flood in Jakarta in January 2013, for example, caused widespread power outages, disrupted multiple transportation networks and displaced more than 10,000 people.

From an engineering perspective, developing innovative solutions that account for the local constraints can increase resilience, and in so doing, limit losses and improve the recovery of urban infrastructures.

In this context, the Disaster REsilience Assessment, Modelling, and INnovation – Singapore project will develop a methodology to assess and predict the resilience of urban infrastructure systems and propose new pathways to develop innovative technologies and services to improve urban infrastructure.

Research under this 1.5-year project is organised in three main tasks:

1. Develop an integrated simulation model to study the performance of urban infrastructure system—which consists of the interdependent power, water, and transport systems—under various disruption and recovery scenarios.
   
2. Based on the synthetic data generated through the simulation model, implement interpretable machine learning algorithms to identify the correlation between different system features and the resilience output, and also their causal relationships.
   
3. Building on the understanding of features that make an urban system resilient, we use Design Science approaches to develop strategies to mitigate the consequences of disruptions and accommodate constraints in specific case studies.
   

The project contributes to the resilience framework that Singapore has developed as part of an actionable plan to mitigate the effects of climate change. It complements this effort by developing a simulation tool to evaluate the risks inherent to the infrastructure (i.e., power, water, and transport systems), developing strategies, and identifying design solutions to increase system resilience.

The project, in line with Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative, aims at improving the infrastructure of the city-state as well as other countries in Southeast Asia against weather-related disasters. Expected outputs include guidelines to help local governments improve infrastructure resilience. These guidelines will then be transformed into design requirements that can be adapted to local requirements to guide new technology and service innovation.

DREAMIN’ SG started in October 2020 as an Intra-CREATE project, funded by the National Research Foundation Singapore, Prime Minister’s Office, under its CREATE programme. The project, hosted by the Singapore-ETH Centre, is a collaboration with Illinois at Singapore Pte Ltd, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), National University of Singapore (NUS), the University of Cambridge and Delft University of Technology.