Introduction
The resilience of infrastructure in cities to changing human demand, new technologies, natural disasters, climate change, and malicious attacks etc. is affected by many factors including engineering functionality, interdependency between subsystems, consumer behaviour, political policy, and planning. Underlying each of these areas are government, businesses, professional societies and university research. Often however there is insufficient communication between these bodies, and between those working in different disciplines. This has the effect of knowledge and understanding developing in a somewhat isolated, parallel strands.

There is now tremendous regional and national opportunity for joint funding from both research councils and government/regional departments to invest in industrial prosperity, especially in critical infrastructures.

About the workshop

The purpose of this workshop is to bridge this communication divide, develop better understanding between disciplines, and to identify research ideas and funding opportunities to support a more holistic approach to the resilience of urban infrastructure. It will bring together research funding councils, government representatives, academics, and businesses.

The workshop will be a combination of briefings from the various participating bodies to understand different perspectives on resilience, and discussion sessions to develop networks and identify potential research themes and innovations.

Aims

The specific aims of the workshop will be to:

• Understand the priorities of a variety of stakeholders around infrastructure resilience
• Explore current research trends in various academic disciplines, including priority areas of: data science & AI, resilience, transport, and cyber-physical systems
• Identify ways in which business, government and academia can collaborate to improve the resilience of infrastructures and cities
• Explore the research funding landscape going forward for resilient urban infrastructure
• Build networks and form groups ready to bid for research funding

Who should attend?

• Academics with a research interest related to the resilience of urban infrastructure
• Policymakers, local government officials and infrastructure related agencies and NGOs from the Midlands
• Research and Development professionals from industry
• Research councils / funders
• Professional Engineering Bodies & Association and other bodies allied to infrastructure