Board 16: Work in Progress: Design of “Risk and Resilience” Focused Courses for Undergraduate Engineering Education Towards a Hazard-Resilient Built Environment

Abstract

In the last few decades, there has been a significant increase in the number and magnitude of natural and man-made hazards, which imposes a tremendous risk to the built environment. In response to the urgent needs for engineering professionals to address these hazards and improve the resilience of our built environment, it is critical to develop a workforce with risk and resilience skills to meet the increasing demand for managing disaster-resilient built environment. This paper presents our work in progress to develop and integrate a set of "risk and resilience" focused courses into engineering education for workforce towards a hazard-resilient built environment. A set of three individual courses, namely, 1) Introduction to Risk and Resiliency in Engineering, 2) Reliability and Optimization Methods in Engineering, 3) Sensing and Data Analytics for Infrastructure Systems will be developed and incorporated into curriculum. These three courses have been designed to be help address the fundamental knowledge and techniques needed for engineers to conduct the assessment, design and management of engineering systems to achieve hazard resilience. The paper provides details about the rational and course objectives, course components, and sample course projects for design and development of these courses. The developed courses can provide useful reference for others institutions to design and implement risk and resilience related courses in the civil engineering curriculum.