About Me
I am Jiaxu Huang (黄嘉旭), a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Construction Management at Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Nan Li, graduating in fall 2026. I received my B.Eng. in Civil Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2021, ranking first in a cohort of 140 students.
My research builds optimization and decision-making models for large-scale engineering systems, applied to post-disaster infrastructure recovery and urban resilience. Working across disciplines, I combine operations research, game theory, reinforcement learning and engineering simulation to address dynamic simulation and coordinated decision-making for complex engineering systems under disasters.
Research Interests
Infrastructure Recovery Decision-Making
Resource allocation, scheduling and recovery-path optimization for interdependent infrastructure systems, focusing on combinatorial optimization under multilayer network constraints, exact solution algorithms, and deep-learning-assisted solution methods.
Infrastructure Resilience Simulation and Assessment
Cascading failure mechanisms, functional degradation and recovery dynamics of complex lifeline networks under multi-hazard scenarios, and the resilience assessment methods built on them.
Climate Adaptation, Collaborative Governance and Equitable Recovery
Long-term resilience planning for urban infrastructure under intensifying hazard risk, cross-agent coordination under incomplete information, and human behavior and equity in recovery.
News
- Our paper “Integrating Social Equity into Resilience-Based Post-Disaster Recovery of Interdependent Infrastructure Systems” appeared in Reliability Engineering & System Safety. 2026
- Received the Academic Rising Star Award from the Department of Construction Management, Tsinghua University. 2026
Education
Tsinghua University, Department of Construction Management, Beijing, China
Huazhong University of Science and Technology, School of Civil and Hydraulic Engineering, Wuhan, China
Publications
Working Papers
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Orchestrating Interdependent Infrastructure Post-Disaster Recovery.Available at SSRN. To be resubmitted to Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.
Journal Papers
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To Be or Not to Be Cooperative: Exploring the Post-Disaster Recovery Game Among Interdependent Infrastructure Networks.Reliability Engineering & System Safety, 274, 112383.
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Integrating Social Equity into Resilience-Based Post-Disaster Recovery of Interdependent Infrastructure Systems.Reliability Engineering & System Safety, 275, 112813.
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A Co-Simulation Approach for Time-Varying Damage Propagation in Interdependent Power and Wastewater Systems During Flood Events.International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 116, 105155.
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Collaborative Decision Making for Natural Disaster Recovery of Interdependent Infrastructure Systems.Reliability Engineering & System Safety, 272, 112472.
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Machine Learning for Infrastructure Recovery from Natural Hazards: A Review.Civil Engineering Sciences, 2, 0013.
Conference Papers
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A Review of Research on Enhancing the Post-Disaster Recovery of Interdependent Critical Infrastructure Systems.CIB Conferences, 1(1), 228. Presented at WBC CIB 2025 (oral presentation).
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Adaptive Post-Disaster Recovery for Infrastructure Systems: Navigating the Repair-vs-Upgrade Dilemma.Accepted for Proceedings of the International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering (i3CE).
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Building Evacuation Parameter Benchmarking: From Multi-Camera Video to Multi-Area 2D/3D Evacuation Trajectory and Congestion Analysis.Proceedings of the 43rd International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction (ISARC), 1872–1879.
Other Outputs
Technical Specification for Seismic Resilience Assessment of Urban Communities, DB11/T 2214-2024 (Beijing local standard, principal contributing author).
Research Projects
- Built decentralized post-disaster recovery decision models for interdependent infrastructure systems grounded in cooperative and non-cooperative game theory.
- For the cooperative case, developed an outer-approximation algorithm to solve the Nash bargaining nonlinear program, generating cooperative recovery plans efficiently.
- For the non-cooperative case, built a Stackelberg model with transfer payments and a dynamic leadership-rotation rule; exploited post-disaster topological sparsity to identify zero-core structures and proposed the ZeroCore branch-and-bound algorithm, decomposing the mixed-integer bilevel program (MIBLP) into tractable subproblems and solving interdependent networks of up to 500 nodes exactly.
- Modeled climate-adaptive post-disaster recovery as a Markov decision process and developed a GraphSAGE-based GNN-PPO reinforcement learning framework whose hybrid reward balances short-term recovery speed against long-term climate adaptation. On the Oahu power grid case this revealed a “resilience premium”, and the learned policy transfers to damage scenarios unseen in training.
- Introduced the Gini coefficient into recovery planning for interdependent infrastructure, turning horizontal equity in inter-community restoration times from a normative principle into an optimizable objective; built a multi-objective framework coupling NSGA-II with HLA co-simulation, validated on the interdependent water and power systems of Mianzhu.
- Built a cross-domain co-simulation framework integrating WCA2D (surface flooding), SWMM (urban drainage) and OpenDSS (power distribution) to capture cascading failures across power and drainage systems under extreme floods at high fidelity.
- Conducted quantitative multi-hazard resilience assessment of the power and road networks of Xining; the findings supported the Special Plan for a Safe and Resilient City in the Central District of Xining.
- Proposed and led development of a simulation-based community seismic resilience assessment method, applied to the assessment, diagnosis and enhancement of lifeline systems in the Yanqing competition zone of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.
Teaching
Service
Journal Reviewer
- International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
- Advanced Engineering Informatics
- Civil Engineering Sciences (Science Partner Journal by AAAS)
- Operations Research and Management Science (运筹与管理)
- Core organizing member: invited and hosted Prof. Timo Hartmann, Vice President of TU Berlin, and led academic liaison and workshop preparation.
- Coordinated the cross-timezone online agenda and in-person academic exchange, contributing to the journal’s international scholarly community.
Honors and Awards
- Academic Rising Star Award, Department of Construction Management, Tsinghua University 2026
- Comprehensive Excellence Scholarship, Tsinghua University 2025
- Outstanding Poster Award, 766th Doctoral Student Forum, Tsinghua University 2024
- Honorable Mention, Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling 2020
- National Scholarship 2018, 2019
- Merit Student, Huazhong University of Science and Technology 2018, 2019
- Distinguished Student, Qiming College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology 2018
Skills
Programming: Python (scientific computing, machine learning, optimization modeling), MATLAB, R (geospatial visualization), Bash/Shell, Git
Typesetting: LaTeX, Typst
Optimization: Gurobi (mixed-integer programming)
Simulation and modeling: OpenDSS (power distribution), SWMM (urban drainage), WCA2D (2D cellular-automata flood modeling); cross-domain co-simulation in MATLAB/Python