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Mimicking nature for resilient resource and infrastructure network design
Abheek Chatterjee1, Astrid Layton1
1J. Mike Walker '66 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University, 3123 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-3123, USA.
Reliability Engineering & System Safety
|November 2, 2020
Summary
Extreme weather demands resilient infrastructure. This study introduces a bio-inspired framework using ecological fitness to guide early-stage design, enhancing network resilience and sustainability.
Area of Science:
- Engineering
- Ecology
- Sustainable Development
Background:
- Extreme weather events increasingly necessitate resilient infrastructure and resource networks for sustainable development.
- Current resilience metrics lack quantitative tools for early-stage design, forcing reliance on heuristics.
- Biological ecosystems offer a model for resilience through a balance of pathway redundancy and efficiency.
Purpose of the Study:
- To reformulate the ecological fitness function for application in resource and infrastructure network design.
- To provide quantitative guidelines for engineers in the early stages of network design for resilience.
- To develop a bio-inspired framework for creating resilient and sustainable networks.
Main Methods:
- Reformulating the ecological fitness function for interdependent network interactions.
- Applying the reformulated metric to analyze two notional supply chain designs.
- Comparing a cost-optimized design with a bio-inspired resilience-focused design.
Main Results:
- The proposed bio-inspired framework enables quantitative resilience assessment in early design stages.
- Supply chains designed using the bio-inspired framework exhibit enhanced resilience characteristics.
- The ecological fitness function, adapted for networks, proves effective in guiding resilient design.
Conclusions:
- A bio-inspired framework using ecological fitness can guide the design of resilient resource and infrastructure networks.
- This approach addresses the limitations of existing metrics in early-stage design.
- The findings support the development of more sustainable and disruption-tolerant networks.
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