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Department of Mechanical Engineering
Student sits at workstation and looks at laptop. © Aliona Kardash​/​TU Dortmund

Prof. Bilal M. Ayyub from the University of Maryland visits CRE

© CRE
CRE Hosts Guest Seminar by Prof. Bilal M. Ayyub From the University of Maryland on Resilience Science and Performance Under Uncertainty in Complex Systems

The Chair for Reliability Engineering welcomed Prof. Bilal M. Ayyub from the University of Maryland, College Park, USA, as a guest between 1 October and 2 October 2026. During his visit, Prof. Ayyub delivered a seminar entitled “Resilience Science: Performance Under Uncertainty in Complex Systems”, on 2 October 2026 at TU Dortmund University, where he shared his extensive knowledge and experience in resilience science, risk analysis, reliability, and the management of complex systems under uncertainty.

In his presentation, Prof. Ayyub discussed resilience as a foundational scientific construct for understanding and managing the performance of complex systems operating under uncertainty. Rather than representing another dimension alongside reliability, safety, risk, robustness, and sustainability, resilience was presented as a unifying framework that integrates and extends these complementary concepts.

The talk addressed the capacity of systems to anticipate, withstand, adapt to, recover from, and evolve in response to disruption, surprise, and change. It further viewed resilience as the science of performance under uncertainty for interconnected physical, cyber, human and social, and organizational systems.

Prof. Ayyub highlighted that, as societies become increasingly dependent on tightly coupled infrastructure networks, approaches centered solely on reliability, safety, or risk are no longer sufficient to characterize cascading failures and emerging threats. Resilience was discussed as a framework for understanding how complex systems sustain essential functions before, during, and after disruptive events.

The lecture emphasized the need for measurement frameworks that support quantitative assessment, economic valuation, informed decision-making, and evidence-based public policy. The seminar outlined a path toward infrastructure systems that are reliable and safe as well as adaptive, resilient, and sustainable in an increasingly uncertain world.

The CRE team greatly values Prof. Ayyub’s visit and the insights shared during his seminar, and looks forward to further scientific exchange on resilience, reliability, risk analysis, and uncertainty-informed decision-making.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Bilal Ayyub is an A. James Clark School of Engineering Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Director of its Center for Technology and Systems Management. He is Co-Director of the International Joint Research Center for Resilient Infrastructure at Tongji University and an Honorary Visiting Professor at Imperial College London. He is a distinguished
 member of ASCE, an honorary member of ASME, a fellow of SNAME, SEI, and the Society for Risk Analysis, and a senior member of IEEE.

Dr. Ayyub has co-authored about 750 publications, including 11 textbooks and 16 edited books, and is the founding editor-in-chief of the ASCE-ASME Journal on Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems. His honors include the 2024 ASCE OPAL Award, the ASCE Alfredo Ang Award, the ASCE President Medal, the ASCE Le Val Lund Award, the ENR Newsmaker award, and the ASNE Solberg Award. His research addresses risk analysis in engineering and economics, with applications to infrastructure, climate hazards, risk finance, and conflict and system-complexity analytics.