Risk is the potential of experiencing a loss when a system does not operate as expected due to uncertainties. Its assessment requires the quantification of both the system failure potential and the multi-faceted failure consequences, which affect further systems. Modern industries (including the engineering and financial sectors) require increasingly large and complex models to quantify risks that are not confined to single disciplines but cross into possibly several other areas. Disasters such as hurricane Katrina, the Fukushima nuclear incident and the global financial crisis show how failures in technical and management systems cause consequences and further failures in technological, environmental, financial, and social systems, which are all inter-related. This requires a comprehensive multi-disciplinary understanding of all aspects of uncertainty and risk and measures for risk management, reduction, control and mitigation as well as skills in applying the necessary mathematical, modelling and computational tools for risk oriented decision-making. This complexity has to be considered in very early planning stages, for example, for the realisation of green energy or nuclear power concepts and systems, where benefits and risks have to be considered from various angles. The involved parties include engineering and energy companies, banks, insurance and re-insurance companies, state and local governments, environmental agencies, the society both locally and globally, construction companies, service and maintenance industries, emergency services, etc. The CDT is focussed on training a new generation of highly-skilled graduates in this particular area of engineering, mathematics and the environmental sciences based at the Liverpool Institute for Risk and Uncertainty. New challenges will be addressed using emerging probabilistic technologies together with generalised uncertainty models, simulation techniques, algorithms and large-scale computing power. Skills required will be centred in the application of mathematics in areas of engineering, economics, financial mathematics, and psychology/social science, to reflect the complexity and inter-relationship of real world systems. The CDT addresses these needs with multi-disciplinary training and skills development on a common mathematical platform with associated computational tools tailored to user requirements. The centre reflects this concept with three major components: (1) Development and enhancement of mathematical and computational skills; (2) Customisation and implementation of models, tools and techniques according to user requirements; and (3) Industrial and overseas university placements to ensure industrial and academic impact of the research. This will develop graduates with solid mathematical skills applied on a systems level, who can translate numerical results into languages of engineering and other disciplines to influence end-users including policy makers. Existing technologies for the quantification and management of uncertainties and risks have yet to achieve their significant potential benefit for industry. Industrial implementation is presently held back because of a lack of multidisciplinary training and application. The Centre addresses this problem directly to realise a significant step forward, producing a culture change in quantification and management of risk and uncertainty technically as well as educationally through the cohort approach to PGR training.

Recovery is "the process of rebuilding, restoring and rehabilitating the community following an emergency" (HMG Emergency Response and Recovery, 2013). For COVID-19, recovery will involve all-of society (because everyone in the country has been affected to some extent) and whole-system (because every organisation, service and function has been affected). Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic we have deployed our research expertise in emergency response and recovery to support government. This has involved providing ongoing information about recovery, producing rapid response guides on aspects of response and recovery, and identifying opportunities for research to support the recovery effort. This project builds on this initial work to understand how government develop plans for short-term, transactional 'recovery' and how they think strategically about longer-term, ambitious, transformational change which we call 'renewal'. Objective: This project works closely with resilience partners in three Local Resilience Forums (LRFs) to develop a generalizable, theoretically underpinned framework for how recovery and renewal to COVID-19 can enhance resilience. The framework will: - Take a whole system approach to recovery and renewal (from communities to national levels) - Explore how to manage the changes in people, places and processes that is needed to live with COVID-19 - Address short-term, transactional recovery as well as longer-term, transformational renewal - Complement existing guidance and resilience standards and inform an international standard that we will write on recovery and renewal Approach: The framework will be informed by (and inform) Recovery Coordination Groups (RCGs) by using an action research approach to work closely with the resilience partners and engage with local and national organisations on how they plan recovery and renewal on a system-wide basis. Our partner LRFs have different structures (e.g. for local governance and recovery governance) and characteristics (e.g. partnerships, priorities, populations, local challenges, inequalities) so we can create a framework that is widely applicable to local variations. Activities: We will: - Collect and analyse national/international lessons on recovery and renewal - Gather primary data by interviewing experts across the world on emergency planning, risk, and resilience - Contribute to three Recovery Coordination Groups (RCGs) as well as three specific renewal projects (e.g. on volunteering, community resilience, demand management in emergency services) - Extensively engage with other local and national government organisations to ensure alignment of our framework and exploit ongoing opportunities for impact - Facilitate webinars and training on recovery and renewal for resilience - Develop and test a framework for recovery and renewal, refine it in different contexts (national and international), learn about its application, and use feedback to improve it - Develop and test a methodology to assess the impact of the framework Main deliverables: - A searchable database of lessons for recovery and renewal for local resilience - Expert briefings on how to implement recovery and renewal for resilience - A generalizable, theoretically underpinned, practice-tested framework to support government's thinking about recovery and renewal for resilience - A self-evaluation methodology to reflect on recovery practices - Publish fortnightly 'The Manchester Briefing on Recovery and Renewal' currently distributed directly (and through a network of national/international partners) to 52,000 people along with case studies and training products - International and national standards having a global impact

Fires in the UK kill about 800 people and cause non-fatal injures to 15,000 every year. For the past 60 years provision for emergency fire-fighting response (i.e. fire cover) in the UK has been based on the density of the built environment. These arrangements have been effective in reducing the incidents of fire in public places, with the result that there is now a tendency for the present system to over-provide fire cover in city centres, whilst there is evidence of under-provision in residential suburban areas, given that 75% of fire deaths currently occur in domestic dwellings. Against this background, it is necessary to develop a risk-based asset management system to reallocate rationally fire and rescue resources and to improve the operations based on risks to life, property and the environment. Previous studies indicate that some uncertainty inference/treatment theories have been used to facilitate fire risk assessment and management (risk-based decision-making). The detailed literature review indicates that there is a lack of a holistic risk-based asset management framework and appropriate supporting tools for use in the fire and rescue services. The available methods in other domains may not be directly tailored for use in risk-based asset management of fire and rescue activities investigated in this research, taking into account the unique nature of fire and rescue operations. To address such identified research needs, in this project, a risk-based asset management framework will be proposed and a set of supporting tools developed in order to deploy effectively available resources, and to improve/optimise inspection, fire-fighting and rescue strategies.This research will first conduct data collection and modelling in close collaboration with the industrial collaborator. Fire and rescue operational processes will be studied together with the characteristics of the fire and rescue services, the type of equipment used and the current strategies adopted. The cost benefit will also be investigated in terms of fire and rescue operational strategies. A generic risk-based framework will be proposed capable of accommodating the modelling of multiple criteria and also have a live database containing models of generic systems/operations. The risk-based framework will be developed to establish guidelines for adopting effective operational strategies in the fire and rescue industry. The framework will be capable of dealing with the risk associated with each operational strategy in terms of various criteria such as response time, operational cost and the level of risk. A formal assessment process of hazard identification, risk estimation, identification of risk control options, cost benefit analysis and decision-making will be used to develop this risk-based framework. The supporting models to be developed for the implementation of the risk-based asset management framework include a subjective risk estimation tool, a multiple attribute decision-making tool, a planning tool for risk-based inspection/maintenance of fire safety systems, a risk-based multi-objective optimisation tool and a marine rescue simulator model. Case studies will be used to demonstrate the proposed framework and the associated supporting tools, and to assess their applicability and effectiveness. The detailed case studies will include the modelling of the deployment of fire engines and the other resources in the industrial collaborator, marine rescue operations in River Mersey and inspection/maintenance scheme of fire safety systems. A prototype software package will be developed, which aims to transform the modelling and investigation work into a platform for interactive risk modelling and decision-making. The awareness of fire risks to the public will be promoted throughout the project.