Strategic Initiative Fund (SIF)

Center for Human–Agentic AI Collaboration for Urban Resilience

The Center for Human–Agentic AI Collaboration for Urban Resilience (HAACUR) brings together U-M researchers, city leaders, local utilities, and community partners to strengthen urban resilience against flooding, severe weather, and water infrastructure failures. It is a cross-unit initiative to build and validate an AI-enabled urban operations simulation platform that enables municipal staff and researchers to collaborate with auditable, human-in-the-loop AI agents through natural language. U-M's Civil & Environmental Engineering and Computer Science teams will work with the Urban Collaboratory, the City of Detroit, and the Great Lakes Water Authority to deliver the platform and joint pilot exercises.

By combining digital-twin city simulations with secure, human-in-the-loop AI assistants, the project will help teams run "what-if" analyses, test scenarios, and coordinate faster, better-informed responses to both everyday operations and emergencies. HAACUR responds to escalating risks faced by urban communities as infrastructure ages, climate impacts intensify, and extreme events become more frequent, creating a shared, interdisciplinary environment where engineers, computer scientists, and operational decision-makers can jointly model interconnected urban systems and anticipate cascading impacts across water, transportation, and other critical services.

This cross-unit hub for smart-city research, engagement, and education will create an AI-enabled city resilience platform using real-time data, connect U-M teams with Detroit, the Great Lakes Water Authority, and other partners to reduce silos, provide education and workforce training for students, city staff, and residents, and establish a scalable, transferable model for additional communities and partnerships — serving as a model for the next generation of resilient smart cities.