Managing Drone Threats to Critical Infrastructure

Managing Drone Threats to Critical Infrastructure

4 PhD Candidate positions within

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Managing Drone Threats to Critical Infrastructure

How do we build a society that can withstand crises, attacks, and unexpected disruptions? A More Resilient Society is a major strategic initiative at NTNU that brings together interdisciplinary expertise and innovative thinking to address complex and societally important challenges. In total, 16 PhD candidates will collaborate across faculties and academic disciplines, focusing on critical societal infrastructure and health preparedness. The aim is to produce research that challenges established assumptions and contributes to a safer and more resilient society.

A more resilient society is increasingly dependent on robust critical infrastructure across different sectors. The geopolitical situation in Europe, including experiences from war and hybrid threats, shows that critical infrastructure can be deliberately targeted using low-cost, commercially available technology, especially drones.

There is a need for knowledge and solutions on how to prevent damage to critical infrastructure caused by drone attacks. The threat landscape, technological development, and resilience capabilities are changing rapidly. This increases the demand for research-based innovation and rapid adaptation.

About the project

The primary objective of the research project is to contribute to a more resilient society by developing knowledge and solutions to understand, manage, and respond to drone threats and attacks against critical infrastructure. The research project will develop and integrate technological, organizational and supply-chain knowledge needed to contribute to robustness and resilience for Norwegian critical infrastructure against rapidly evolving drone threats, thereby strengthening societal resilience, national preparedness and scientific understanding of hybrid risks.

The project consists of four PhD projects:

• Drone detection and interception solutions. Objective: develop solutions for drone detection & interception for protection of critical infrastructure
• Consequences of drone attacks. Objective: test and simulate detonating drones and their impacts on critical infrastructures
• Modelling risk and vulnerability in the supply chains for drone detection and interception systems. Objective: develop knowledge on risks and vulnerabilities in value chains for protecting against drone threats to critical infrastructures
• Organizing and decision-making in drone operations. Objective: develop organization models and decision-making frameworks for drone operations

The four PhD projects are hosted by the Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management, the Department of Engineering Cybernetics and the Department of Structural Engineering. The research project is thus multidisciplinary. All project members will contribute to added scientific value across the work packages. The project will thus be organized to ensure multidisciplinary research through e.g. joint scenarios to be addressed across the PhD projects, joint publications across the PhD projects and frequent meetings. There are clear input-output relations between the four PhD projects that will strengthen the multidisciplinary added value.

More information about the positions

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