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Research
Research is the engine of everything SoReCC does. We work to understand how societies, infrastructures and institutions can stay functional, safe and fair in the face of climate change, emerging risks and rapid technological change, and to turn that understanding into tools, methods and evidence that others can use. Our research is applied and problem-driven. I
t begins with the real challenges faced by infrastructure operators, public authorities and communities, and it aims to leave behind something usable: a risk assessment framework, a planning tool, a resilience methodology, or a clearer basis for decisions.
We pursue it in collaboration, as part of European research consortia that bring together universities, research institutes, industry and the public sector, because the problems we study are too large and too interconnected for any single discipline or organisation to address alone.
A few principles run through everything we do.
- Problem first. We start from real operational and societal challenges rather than methods in search of an application, so that results are relevant from the outset.
- Multi-disciplinary by default. Engineering, the social sciences, economics and environmental research are combined in a single frame, because resilience and risk sit precisely where disciplines meet.
- Quantitative where it counts. We build rigorous risk, vulnerability and resilience models, and we are explicit about uncertainty rather than hiding it.
- Co-created with users. The operators, authorities and communities who will use a result help shape it, which makes the result both better and more likely to be adopted.
- Built to be used. We translate findings into frameworks, tools and guidance and share them openly, so the knowledge outlives the project that produced it.
Our research runs across the seven areas that define our expertise, and most projects touch several at once. A study of inland waterway resilience is at the same time a question of climate adaptation, emerging risk and critical infrastructure; a project on safer mining is at once about operational risk, worker safety and the environment.
We work across:
- Climate Change Resilience -> /climate-change-resilience
- Climate Risk Adaptation -> /climate-risk-adaptation
- Emerging Risks Management -> /emerging-risks-management
- Environmental and Urban Planning -> /environmental-and-urban-planning
- Societal Resilience -> /societal-resilience
- Artificial Intelligence Governance and Resilience -> /artificial-intelligence-governance-and-resilience
- Urban Health and Quality of Life Strategies -> /urban-health-and-quality-of-life-strategies
Across our projects a consistent methodological signature has emerged, grounded in resilience assessment and business continuity:
- multi-hazard vulnerability and risk assessment for infrastructure, assets and operations
- probabilistic and surrogate modelling that captures uncertainty and interdependence
- mpact propagation analysis, tracing how a disturbance in one part of a system reaches the rest
- organisational resilience and business continuity frameworks for owners, operators and authorities
- early warning logic and decision-support tools that turn assessment into timely action
- resilience indicators and what-if scenario environments for planning and stress-testing
These capabilities are deliberately domain-agnostic. The same rigour applies whether the system in question is a waterway network, a mine, a city or a public service, which is what allows our work to move across sectors without losing depth.
SoReCC contributes to European research and innovation projects funded under Horizon Europe and related programmes. In our current projects we lead the work on risk, vulnerability and resilience assessment, reflecting the strengths described above.
PLOTO: resilience of inland waterway transport
Programme: Horizon Europe Innovation Action (Grant Agreement No. 101069941)
Duration: September 2022 to February 2026 (42 months)
Consortium: 20 partners across 8 European countries
Pilot sites: Belgium, Hungary and Romania
SoReCC role: Work Package leader, vulnerability and resilience assessment
Freight transport keeps Europe's economy moving, and inland waterways are among its most efficient arteries, yet they are increasingly exposed to extreme weather, accidents and other disruptions. PLOTO is building an integrated planning platform that lets the authorities and operators who manage this infrastructure assess and strengthen its resilience, combining high-resolution climate modelling, sensor and satellite observation, tailored weather forecasting and real-time impact assessment in a single what-if environment.
SoReCC leads the work package on the vulnerability and resilience assessment of inland waterways and their connected hinterland infrastructure. We carry out multi-hazard vulnerability assessment across waterway elements such as channels, banks, slopes and bridges, develop both detailed and simplified surrogate models for near-real-time assessment, and build the holistic risk assessment and impact-propagation framework at the heart of the platform. From this we deliver an organisational resilience framework that lets owners, managers and policy makers judge the resilience of the whole network, together with a method for keeping that assessment current as infrastructure degrades and recovers.
Programme: Horizon Europe research and innovation
Consortium: 21 partners across 8 European countries
Demonstration sites: Open and underground mines in France, Greece and Bulgaria
SoReCC role: Task leader, holistic operational risk assessment and continuity planning
Europe's industry depends on secure and sustainable access to critical raw materials, yet extracting them safely and efficiently poses real technological, environmental and human challenges. NetHelix demonstrates a toolbox of new technologies to automate and streamline extraction across the value chain, raising efficiency and resource use while reducing waste and improving environmental, health and safety standards, and connecting cyber and physical systems to extract insight and sharpen decisions.
SoReCC leads the task on holistic operational risk assessment and continuity planning. We build a fully-probabilistic surrogate model of the mining operation that simulates the interaction of equipment and workers, and an uncertainty-aware risk and vulnerability framework that rates each process and its external dependencies and propagates uncertainty through the whole operation. The result acts as a near-real-time early warning system, flagging high-risk situations before they escalate, and feeds a decision-support system with continuous risk ratings and optimised business continuity plans.