Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP 2.0)

This CRISP 2.0 solicitation responds both to national needs on the resilience of critical infrastructures and to increasing NSF emphasis on transdisciplinary research. In this context, the solicitation is one element of the NSF-wide Risk and Resilience activity, with the overarching goal of advancing knowledge in support of improvement of the nation’s infrastructure resilience. The devastating effects of recent disasters such as Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria have underscored that a great deal remains to be done. In addition, CRISP 2.0 is aligned with the NSF-wide frontier thinking on convergence, characterized as “deep integration of knowledge, techniques, and expertise from multiple fields to form new and expanded frameworks for addressing scientific and societal challenges and opportunities”. The Directorate of Engineering and the Directorate of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences therefore jointly invest in the CRISP 2.0 solicitation to stimulate the integration of engineering, and social, behavioral and economic sciences to foster new paradigms and domains in interdependent critical infrastructures. 

Critical infrastructures are the mainstay of our nation's economy, security and well-being. They provide essential services through systems and processes. Many of the critical infrastructures are interconnected and even interdependent. This solicitation calls for integrated research on Interdependent Critical Infrastructures (ICIs) by interdisciplinary teams of engineers and social, behavioral, and economic scientists. Research funded through this program is expected to provide the momentum to create a new science of integrative designs in ICIs, to stimulate economic growth, and to inform how communities can engage diverse resources to improve the quality of life for their inhabitants.

Infrastructures are networks of systems and processes that function cooperatively and synergistically to produce and distribute a continuous flow of essential goods and services. For this competition, two or more infrastructures are said to be interdependent if they require each other’s services or if the processes by which they deliver services can be affected by each other. The goals of the Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes 2.0 (CRISP 2.0) solicitation are to: (1) foster an interdisciplinary research community of engineers and social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) scientists who work synergistically together for innovation in the design and management of infrastructures as processes and services; (2) transform relevant fields by re-thinking ICIs as processes and services that may have complementary and/or substitutional roles with each other; (3) create innovations in ICIs that contribute directly and positively to people’s quality of life, spur economic growth, and respond to both internal perturbations and external shocks, regardless of whether they are natural, technological or human-induced. These goals lead to the following specific objectives for this solicitation:

• To generate new knowledge, approaches, and solutions to resilience and improve the capability of existing and future ICIs to respond to internal and external changes;
• To create innovative, theoretical frameworks and multidisciplinary models of ICIs, processes and services, capable of modeling, monitoring, and predicting complex behaviors and outcomes in response to both internal and external shocks;
• To develop integrative frameworks to understand interdependencies among ICIs and leverage them to enhance the processes and services that ICIs provide;
• To study socioeconomic, cultural, political, legal, and psychological and other obstacles to improving ICIs and to identify strategies for overcoming these obstacles; and
• To support the creation, curation, and use of publicly accessible data on infrastructure systems and processes, whether in the context of explanation, prediction or modeling.

Successful proposals are expected to study at least two infrastructures which are interdependent in the provision of one or more services, thereby contributing to a new interdisciplinary paradigm in research on ICIs. Proposals must broadly integrate engineering and social, behavioral and/or economic sciences. Therefore, proposals that do not have at least one social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) scientist and one engineer on the team will be returned without review. Additionally, PIs are also encouraged to incorporate complementary perspectives from other disciplines such as computing and data science, ecology, seismology, and statistics.

See Section X, Appendix for frequently asked questions (FAQs).