SS 15
Complex engineering and infrastructure systems, such as transportation networks, high-speed rail systems, energy systems, and major engineering projects, are increasingly exposed to uncertainty, interdependence, and dynamic disturbances. In such systems, initial disruptions rarely remain isolated. Instead, they often trigger secondary risks, cascading failures, and unintended consequences through network coupling, operational interactions, resource constraints, and managerial responses. These follow-on effects may significantly degrade system performance, delay recovery, and amplify economic and social losses. This special session focuses on the modeling, assessment, and optimization of secondary risks and cascading effects in complex engineering and infrastructure systems. It aims to bridge perspectives from reliability and resilience analysis, complex network theory, engineering project management, planning and control, and optimization under uncertainty. Particular attention will be paid to how robustness, vulnerability, and resilience can be jointly analyzed when disturbances propagate across interconnected technical and managerial structures.
The session particularly welcomes recent advances in secondary risk scenario generation, including data-driven, simulation-based, and generative approaches for constructing plausible, diverse, and decision-relevant scenarios. It also encourages contributions on optimization of secondary risk response strategies, including preventive actions, adaptive interventions, and multi-stage decision models under uncertainty. By integrating methodological innovation with practical applications, this session seeks to advance a more comprehensive understanding of how secondary risks and cascading effects can be identified, generated, evaluated, and managed across engineering and infrastructure contexts. It aims to provide both theoretical insights and actionable guidance for improving the safety, resilience, and decision quality of complex real-world systems.
Topics of Interest
Secondary risks and cascading effects in complex engineering systems
Cascading failure modeling in transportation, high-speed rail, and infrastructure networks
Project portfolio management and optimization under propagated uncertainties
Secondary risk scenario generation methods
Data-driven, simulation-based, and generative approaches for secondary risk scenario construction
Optimization of secondary risk response plans under uncertainty
Risk-informed optimization for secondary risk mitigation and resilience enhancement...
