A multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural educational experience: The PhD school on vulnerability, risk and resilience of complex systems and critical infrastructures

One of today´s major challenges is to integrate the different disciplines involved in the design, operation and maintenance of complex systems. Examples are transportation systems (cars, trains, airplanes...), energy production plants (renewable energy, thermal and nuclear power...), transportation and distribution networks (energy transmission and distribution, water distribution, gas transportation, road and railway networks) etc. Company executives, project managers, operation and design engineers need to grasp the opportunities coming from these complex, integrated systems while avoiding risks, to the extent possible. Decisions must be taken in uncertain environments: then, uncertainty needs to be handled, for effective and rational decision-making. The one-week PhD school aims at providing an advanced training on concepts, methods and tools for assessing and managing risks and opportunities in complex systems. The courses offered cover concepts and methods for the evaluation, management and control of technical risks, as well as the uncertainties in the evaluations for confident decision-support. The presented approaches are notably based on Systems Analysis, Systems Engineering, Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, The objective is to provide the participants with adequate tools for tackling the problem with scientific rigor. The acquired concepts, methods and tools constitute an essential part of the skills that researchers, engineers and managers must have. In the end, the courses provide the knowledge and competence needed to architect and operate complex systems, i.e. to make them efficient and reliable in operation, and resilient to major hazardous events. One key objective of the PhD school is to engage multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural teams of students in the definition, design and development of a scientific research process in the areas of interest for the disciplines of risk assessment and uncertainty analysis. To this aim, “mixed” teams of participants with different backgrounds and Institutions of origin are formed at the beginning of the PhD school, and charged with the definition and statement of a research problem to be addressed. The procedures and frames of work for the development of original solutions to the problems defined by the various teams are discussed in self-managed sessions at the end of each day. Engagement by industrial partners in the monitoring of the projects is offered. At the end of the week, the teams present the definitions of the problems and illustrate the research work that they intend to carry out for their original solutions. The teams have, then, to continue the work throughout the following semester, with the objective of producing scientific papers presenting the findings of the research. Once positively evaluated by the responsibles of the PhD school, the papers can be submitted to the appropriate international communities of peers for publication on international journals or presentation at international conferences. The benefits of the projects are expected to be an independent and direct exposure to: research problem definition and solution; multi-national, multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary, long-distance research work management.