Dr. Alex Sixie Cao (currently Postdoc at Empa and ETH Zurich) will join as an Assistant Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore - from July 2026. We are currently recruiting multiple PhD students & Postdocs. NTU CEE ↗
Risk-informed decision-making
From individual decisions to policy: modelling interactions and emergent system behaviour.
We study how stakeholders make decisions under uncertainty, how incentives shape behaviour, and how local interactions scale to collective outcomes. By combining ideas from decision theory and behavioural modelling, we investigate how rational and boundedly rational behaviours influence the safety, evolution, and performance of structural and infrastructure systems.
Key questions
- How do different stakeholders make decisions under uncertainty, limited information, and multiple objectives?
- How do individual incentives and behaviours interact to produce collective, emergent outcomes?
- How can decision frameworks incorporate rationality, ethics, and systemic impacts over time?
Research themes
Decision theory and uncertainty
We use utility theory to understand how stakeholders make choices under uncertainty, conflicting objectives, and limited information.
Emergent behaviour
We analyse how individual decisions generate emergent collective behaviour to evaluate the performance and robustness of policies.
Policy testing
We develop virtual policy experiments to test how infrastructure policies perform under uncertainty and heterogeneous stakeholder behaviour.
Methods and tools
Our work combines behavioural modelling, computational simulation, and risk analysis:
- Decision-theoretic models for utility, preferences, and bounded rationality.
- Scenario-based simulations to evaluate the robustness, adaptability, and unintended consequences of policies.
- Integrated decision frameworks combining uncertainty propagation, incentives, and system feedback.