EAGER: SAI: Collaborative Research: Behavioral Theories for Resilient and Sustainable Infrastructure

EAGER：SAI：协作研究：弹性和可持续基础设施的行为理论

• 批准号: 2121585
• 负责人: Majid Ghayoomi
• 金额: $ 9.99万
• 依托单位: University of New Hampshire
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-09-01 至 2024-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2121585&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: EAGER; SAI; Collaborative; Research; Behavioral

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.This SAI project investigates interactions between the human decision-making process and infrastructure performance. Human actions and the decisions made in planning, designing and constructing infrastructure are influenced by an engineer’s socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, attitudes, values, and perceptions. Infrastructure response is also driven by uncertainties in material properties, design strategies, and physical and climatic stressors. This project links a well-studied social science framework (The Theory of Planned Behavior) to engineering modeling, offering new and transformative knowledge about infrastructure management. The new research models are specifically tested in the context of resilient flood protection systems such as levees and breakwaters in flood-prone communities of the Northeastern United States. The project aims to advance social science theory, develop new metrics for measuring and predicting the interaction of social, economic, and physical behavior of infrastructure components, and to use these metrics to enhance the resilience of infrastructure. The project ultimately helps to connect engineers with tools and methods that enable them to better understand and consider human behavior, potentially leading to tangible physical outputs. This will improve infrastructure design and performance assessment, making infrastructure safer, more cost-effective, and resilient.This project focuses primarily on theory building to develop a dynamic and novel model merging the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and System Dynamics Modeling. The goal is to integrate important social science variables such as values, norms, and attitudes into the flow of decision making an engineer undertakes for infrastructure design and uncertainties associated with infrastructure performance. The project develops a refined theoretical framework merging TPB with engineering, including a systematic theory-driven literature review, interviews with experts, and a survey of the engineering community. This static model is then transitioned to a more dynamic system platform incorporating dependencies, sensitivity analyses, and multivariate statistics. Bridging the theory to practice is tested on two flood defense target infrastructure systems (levees and breakwaters) in flood-prone communities of the Northeastern United States. The anticipated outcomes of the research include advancing social science theory, developing new metrics for measuring and predicting the interaction of social, economic, and physical behavior of infrastructure components, and using these metrics to enhance the resilience of infrastructure in design, construction, performance, and maintenance phases. The project builds a transdisciplinary new theory by extending a widely studied behavioral framework to strengthen convergence between social science and infrastructure. Ultimately, the project will help to connect engineers with tools and methods that enable better understanding of human processes that intervene in the performance of urban infrastructure.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.

加强美国基础设施(stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially American Infrastructure，SAI)是美国国家科学基金会的一项旨在加强美国基础设施的变革性研究的计划。有效的基础设施计划( Efficient Infrastructure )为社会经济 活力和广泛的生活质量改善提供了坚实的基础。强大、可靠和有效的基础设施 刺激私营部门的创新，增长经济，创造就业机会，提高公共部门 服务的提供效率，加强社区，促进机会平等， 保护自然环境，增强国家安全，并推动美国的领导地位。 要实现这些目标，需要来自科学和工程 学科的专业知识。 SAI专注于 如何了解人类推理和决策、治理、 以及社会和 文化流程 使 能够构建 和 维护 有效的基础设施，改善生活和社会，并建立在技术、 和工程的进步之上。这个SAI项目调查人类决策过程和基础设施性能之间的互动。在规划、设计和建设基础设施时，人的行为和决策受到工程师的社会经济和人口特征、态度、价值观和看法的影响。基础设施的响应也受到材料特性、设计策略以及物理和气候压力因素的不确定性的推动。该项目将一个经过充分研究的社会科学框架(计划行为理论)与工程建模联系起来，提供有关基础设施管理的新的和变革性的知识。新的研究模型是在美国东北部洪水易发社区的堤坝和防波堤等具有弹性的防洪系统的背景下进行专门测试的。该项目旨在推进社会科学理论，开发新的指标来衡量和预测基础设施组件的社会、经济和物理行为的相互作用，并使用这些指标来增强基础设施的弹性。该项目最终有助于将工程师与工具和方法联系起来，使他们能够更好地理解和考虑人类行为，从而潜在地产生有形的物理输出。这将改进基础设施设计和性能评估，使基础设施更安全、更具成本效益和弹性。本项目主要关注理论构建，以开发一个融合了计划行为理论(TPB)和系统动力学建模的动态新模型。目标是将重要的社会科学变量(如价值观、规范和态度)整合到工程师为基础设施设计和与基础设施性能相关的不确定性进行决策的流程中。该项目开发了一个精致的理论框架，将TPB与工程学结合起来，包括系统的理论驱动的文献回顾、专家访谈和对工程界的调查。然后将该静态模型转换为包含依赖关系、敏感度分析和多变量统计的更动态的系统平台。理论与实践之间的桥梁在美国东北部洪水易发社区的两个防洪目标基础设施系统(堤坝和防波堤)上进行了测试。研究的预期结果包括推进社会科学理论，开发新的指标来衡量和预测基础设施组件的社会、经济和物理行为的相互作用，并使用这些指标来增强基础设施在设计、施工、性能和维护阶段的弹性。该项目通过扩展一个被广泛研究的行为框架来建立一个跨学科的新理论，以加强社会科学和基础设施之间的融合。最终，该项目将有助于将工程师与工具和方法联系起来，使他们能够更好地了解干预城市基础设施性能的人类过程。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。