LEAP-HI: Re-Engineering for Adaptable Lives and Businesses

Maximizing efficiency has been the driving force for economic growth and industrial expansion in modern societies. It is also a defining attribute of the smart and sustainable cities movement. However, maximizing efficiency often results in systems that are unable to adapt to external disruptions, as demonstrated in the wake of many disasters, including COVID-19. While there have been calls for increasing redundancy, adding redundancies in systems design increases costs and resource demands. What is needed is an adaptable societal system that can operate in a variety of configurations in response to a wide range of disruptions, thereby displaying both efficiency and resilience. This Leading Engineering for America's Prosperity, Health, and Infrastructure (LEAP-HI) project supports fundamental research to generate the knowledge, mechanisms, and tools needed to design an adaptable society in which businesses and transportation systems can readily switch between alternative operating modalities, and people are informed and can adapt to system changes without undue hardship. The research methods and results will contribute to the US economy and prosperity and the public well-being and health. Two case studies addressing the vibrancy of small to mid-scale food systems in Seattle and Phoenix will focus on challenges encountered by marginalized communities that include disproportionately large shares of frontline workers in food establishments and public transit users. The project will engage students at both sites, and a studio class that integrates research and education will help train a new generation of students in engineering and planning for increased adaptability to disruptions.

The project aims to develop systematic ways to reconfigure urban spaces for a variety of uses, design mechanisms that provide business owners and transit operators with a set of options and decision support tools capable of accounting for future uncertainties, and model how information flows through a system so that people can adapt to external disruptions. Equally important, the project integrates people, businesses, and transit into a system of systems, thus enabling a better understanding of how society can adapt to different disruptions. The whole decision support system will be tested in both Seattle and Phoenix. This research will advance knowledge at the intersection of different disciplinary areas including urban planning, controls and optimization, human behaviors, and transportation systems analysis. Specific scientific advances include the development of multi-stage optimization under uncertainty, modeling human adaptive behaviors for which the choice dimensions are no longer mutually exclusive, and modeling the co-evolution of multiple systems in the event of a disruption.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.