Preface: special issue on resilient energy systems

ABSTRACT

Energy systems are critical infrastructures in modern society, supplying continuous energy services to end-users. With growing connectivity and interdependency within these critical infrastructures, modern energy systems are increasingly exposed to disruptions, whether due to system component failures, climate change, terrorism, or natural disasters. With these largely inevitable disruptive events, it is a pressing challenge for systems designers as well as operators to ensure the resilience of energy systems. Accordingly, there is an emergent need for a better understanding on how to deal with disruptions and further achieve the resilience of energy systems. This special issue on resilient energy systems thus provides a collection of eight research articles, presenting the latest studies on the important topic. It is our hope to provide inspirations to advance the frontier of this important area of research and instill a further research agenda in the community for the developments of generally improved knowledge, technology and organizational capacity for resilient energy systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• Reliability
• Interdependency
• Energy Systems
• Critical Infrastructures

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pingfeng Wang

Dr. Pingfeng Wang is currently an Associate Professor, the Donald Biggar Willett Faculty Scholar and the Jerry S. Dobrovolny Faculty Scholar in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He got his B.S. in 2001 in Mechanical Engineering from University of Science and Technology in Beijing, his M.S. in 2006 in Applied Mathematics from Tsinghua University and his Ph.D. in 2010 in Mechanical Engineering from University of Maryland. Dr. Wang is a member of IISE, ASME, IEEE, and AIAA. He has served as the president for IISE Quality Control and Reliability Engineering (QCRE) Division, and on the Board of Directors for the annual Reliability & Maintainability Symposium (RAMS), IEEE Reliability Administrative Committee (AdCom), AIAA non-deterministic Approach (NDA) technical committee and ASME Design Automation Conference executive committee. He has served as the program chair for 2020 IISE Annual Conference, the conference chair for the 2020 ASME Design Automation Conference, and the program chair for IEEE Annual Conference on Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) continuously from 2012 to 2015. Dr. Wang’s expertise is in the area of engineering design for reliability and failure resilience, failure prognostics and health management. His focused research effort on developing new design models and efficient computational tools to improve resilience and sustainability of engineered systems has garnished him notable national and international awards including two times ASME DAC Best Paper Awards in 2008 and 2013, respectively, IEEE PHM Best Paper Award in 2012, and IISE QCRE Best Paper Award in 2020. He is the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2014, the Young Researcher Award from International Society of Green Manufacturing and Applications in 2012, and the Young Investigator Award from ASME design automation committee in 2016. Dr. Wang’s research has been sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, Office of Naval Research, and private industry sponsors such as Spirit AeroSystem Inc. Dr. Wang is currently serving as the review editor for the Springer journal of structural and multidisciplinary optimization, and the Associate Editor for the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design.

Haitao Liao

Haitao Liao is a Professor, and John and Mary Lib White Endowed Systems Integration Chair in the Department of Industrial Engineering at University of Arkansas–Fayetteville. He received a Ph.D. degree in industrial and systems engineering from Rutgers University in 2004. He also earned M.S. degrees in industrial engineering and statistics from Rutgers University, and a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology. His research has been sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and industry. The research findings of his group have been published in IISE Transactions, European Journal of Operational Research, Naval Research Logistics, IEEE Transactions on Reliability, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, The Engineering Economist, Reliability Engineering & System Safety, etc. In 2014, he served as Chair of INFORMS Quality, Statistics and Reliability (QSR) Section, and President of IISE Quality Control and Reliability Engineering (QCRE) Division. He served as Associate Editor for Journal of Quality Technology and IEEE Transactions on Reliability, and currently serves as Associate Editor for IISE Transactions on Quality and Reliability Engineering. He received the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2010, the IISE QCRE William A.J. Golomski Award for three times, 2013 QCRE Track Best Paper Award, Stan Ofsthun Best Paper Award twice, and the prestigious 2017 Alan O. Plait Award for Tutorial Excellence. He is a Fellow of IISE, and a member of INFORMS and SRE.