Doctoral Programme in Engineering and Public Policy – (Ph.D.)

The Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP) is launching, in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University and in the context of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, a new Doctoral Program in Engineering and Public Policy (EPP). This Doctoral Program is a new, interdisciplinary program focused on the technological and policy issues that arise when designing, developing, regulating, implementing and managing networked infrastructures. This new, interdisciplinary program addresses technological and policy issues that arise when designing, developing, regulating, implementing and managing networked infrastructures. Although the initial emphasis is on the Energy and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) fields, the broad range of problems to be tackled includes: Policy and Risk-Related Studies; New Technological Paradigms; Security and Privacy Policy; Electricity Infrastructure; Smart Grids and Electric Vehicles; Energy and Environment Policy; Net Neutrality; Spectrum Management Policy;

Engineering and Public Policy (EPP) is a scientific field that adds a social science dimension to engineering and addresses unstructured and complex problems that can only be tackled by combining fundamental as well as applied knowledge from different traditional research fields using multidisciplinary research techniques and tools.

By unstructured problems one means issues faced in everyday life that are, at first, only fuzzy defined and require one to collect more data and information to fully grasp their scope and impact and only in the presence of those data one can provide accurate intelligence for informed decision making. To tackle this sort of issues one also needs to identify the appropriate research questions to be answered and the best research methodologies that can help shed light on the issues at hand, drawing from a vast and diversified suite of tools and methods.

By complex one means that several agents have stakes at the issues at hand and only by understanding the incentives and the positioning of each and every of them one can appreciate the full set of possible outcomes. In other words, states of the world are determined by the interaction among agents who, many times, portray different views about the same problems and thus act towards achieving conflicting goals. In addition, often times, outcomes arise, as emergent behavior in complex systems does, just from the fact that real world problems involve systems (of agents) whose parts interact in ways that can only be explained if studied at the proper level of abstraction. These systems cannot be described by the sum of their parts and exhibit a level of complexity that is only tractable by employing the appropriate research tools and methods.

To further complicate research tasks in EPP, most of the real world problems one tackles involve the study of very large scale systems that span across international borders, such as Information and Communication Technology (ICTs) systems, energy systems and transportation systems. This observation raises challenging questions for the design, implementation, operation and maintenance of such systems as well as for defining methodologies, methods and tools for evaluating their impact, both in social, cultural and economic terms.

The research tools typically used to study this type of multidisciplinary problems include methods and methodologies borrowed from micro-economics, econometrics, operations research, decision making (under uncertainty) and risk management, dynamic strategic planning and (real) options theory, systems dynamics and stochastic modeling, industrial organization, innovation and economic growth theory and management science. A common language of rigor, rooted in the formal mathematical treatment of the issues addressed, supports most of the work developed in the EPP field, which is also complemented with qualitative analysis.