Today's global challenges, including the climate change, are the product of reductionist view to highly complex and integrated problems. Any resilient change or innovation requires multidimensional considerations including policy, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental (PESTLE). We take this approach in designing new technological solutions such as electric vehicle networks, P2P energy networks, biogas infrastructure, and community energies.

We are surrounded by and are part of various networks including genetics, genealogy, social, economic and environmental networks. Add to these the so-called critical infrastructure networks (e.g., telecommunications, water, gas, electricity, and transportation including roadway, railway, airway, seaway, and subway). The key challenge in dealing with complex networks is to understand how they adapt, evolve, and behave. We can study them by describing and modelling them, using network theories and borrowing knowledge from various disciplines and applications.

We work on the development of frameworks to assess various business models in resource-sharing networks to understand the best way of network coordination which leads to network resilience. We growingly see that cooperation improves the utility for the network community as a whole. Still, for a cooperative network, there is a need for fine-tuned features to maximise the efficiency. As case studies, we have assessed energy communities as well as workplace networks.

Historically, the interaction between the gas and electricity networks has been one-directional: the electricity network has been one of the consumers of the natural gas network for running gas power plants (i.e., gas-to-power, GtP). With the increased penetration of renewable energies into the electricity grid, a new challenge of electron over-supply and under-supply arises due to variable renewable resource availability. This challenge has created abundant interest in the “power-to-gas (PtG)” concept, where surplus electrons from the electricity network can be converted to hydrogen or methane to feed into the natural gas network. We have been working on this project for some years with a few innovative solutions already introduced.

The interdependency of water and energy networks is growing into complexity and creating multiple challenges and opportunities. While the energy sector is, increasingly, seeing a bright renewable (net-zero) future accessible, the prospect for the water sector is tough with a growing fraction of the world population living in water-scarce conditions. Water recycling and desalination are indeed the way forward. But, the destination is energy intensive and costly, making it less attractive for developing economies.

As systems engineers, we use flexible manufacturing techniques to design network-integrated desalination systems which minmise the cost of water.