Practice-oriented Teaching: New Lecture on Smart Resilience Technologies

Digital decision-making technologies play a crucial role in ensuring the resilience of critical infrastructures, as overall complexity increases with rising climatic, digital and geopolitical risks and growing interconnectedness. To prepare future professionals for these challenges, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the technology company SAP have jointly developed the lecture “Smart Resilience Technologies”. The focus is on adaptation strategies for complex transformation processes.

Close Integration of Teaching and Innovation

The content is based, among other things, on research conducted by KIT's Institute for Thermal Energy Technology and Safety (ITES) on systemic resilience. The solutions developed there integrate complex dependencies, uncertainties, and systemic effects, providing intuitive, practical tools for decision-makers. “We provide the digital analysis and decision-making framework FRAMESS, which is already available as a prototype and can be adapted for developing resilience strategies in transformation processes of companies and critical infrastructures, as well as for crisis management,” explains Dr. Sadeeb Simon Ottenburger, head of the Resilient and Smart Infrastructure Systems department at ITES and member of the Centre for Disaster Management and Risk Reduction Technology at KIT.

Students learn how to use systemic modeling, digital twins, simulations, generative AI, and SAP-based technologies to assess and improve the resilience of companies and critical infrastructures. A key component is a practical project that addresses real-world challenges – such as those in supply chains and infrastructure. This enables students to understand how to manage complexity while developing a scalable approach that can have a real and sustainable impact – both for companies and for operators of critical infrastructures.

sfo, December 4, 2025