Theme 2: Visualizing and optimising interdependencies within and across infrastructures

This theme brings together interests in the visualization of complex engineering projects; and interests in interdependencies across different kinds of infrastructure systems, towards systems engineering in a human-natural environment.

Within this theme there is a concern with data analytics and display using immersive visualization, augmented reality and BIM techniques. As analytics and modelling become conducted across datasets, there are questions about how such engineering information is aggregated, analysed, presented and visualised; how its validity is verified; and how users are made aware of the validity and provenance of aggregated information through visual displays. Here there are connections with work on computationally unifying urban master-planning in the Data Science Institute.

Systems engineering is typically focused on elements that can include people, information technologies, materials, policies and documents that are needed for systems-level integration. However, to achieve sustainable development requires a further expansion of the systems engineering boundary to include the circular economy and ecosystem services (that is, the benefits people obtain from ecosystems) in decision-making.

Hence, research interest within this theme include:

• Developing decision-making support tools - Starting with the decision, this work traces back to the kind of information that needs to be synthesised, optimised and made available to the decision maker.
• Visualizing interactions - Displaying physical connections, mass, energy and information flows across interfaces in systems. This work will use graph theory to analyse and make visible the interactions involved across complex engineering projects
• Visualization of built infrastructure - This work will develop new visual interfaces to digital information about built assets; overlaying analytic information onto the physical representation and creating workflows for scalable interactive visualisation forms.

This theme is connected to the work of Dr Ana Mijic and Dr Ivan Stoianov (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering)