About
Dr. Mario P. Brito is a Professor of Risk Analysis and Risk Management at the University of Southampton. His speciality is risk analysis of complex systems (autonomous systems, maritime systems, arctic drilling systems, medical systems etc). His research has focused on the development of novel risk models that consider the technical system and its interaction with human and organisation factors. His recent work has focused on the use of AI algorithms and multi-variate statistical models for advancing risk models for ship navigation, aviation security and autonomous systems.
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Dynamic Probabilistic Risk Assessment of Complex Systems
- Impact of Organizational Factors on Socio-technical Systems Risk
- Root cause analysis and Accident Investigations
- Bayesian Methods and Machine Learning algorithms for Risk Assessment
- Optimisation methods for risk management
Current research
Research Projects:
- 2017 -2018 PI Research Collaboration Stimulus Fund SMMI (17/18). Air Pollution Scoping Study £5,100.
- 2017 – 2018 present Co-I Research Collaboration Stimulus Fund SMMI (17/18). The Atlantic Hurricane Season 2017: Context, Impacts and Long-term Recovery £8,525.
- 2015- 2017 PI KTP Marine Autonomous Systems Risk and Reliability, £161K
- 2015-2019 Work-Package 7 leader EU Horizon2020 BRIDGES, Euro 256K
- 2015 PI EU Horizon2020 BRIDGES, Euro 1.8M
- 2013 Researcher in the EU funded ROBOCADEMY ITN £120K
- 2011-2012. Researcher in the EU funded GROOM project £155K
- 2011-2012. Co-Researcher in NERC funded Tracking AUV risk mitigation, £65K
Visiting Academics
- 2019-2020. Associate Professor Guoquan Chen. Autonomous Ship Risk Management. Jimei University, China.
- 2019-2020. Professor Qiang Zhao. Marine Transportation Risk Management. Jimei University, China.
Current external PhD supervision:
Long Hoang (Memorial University of NewFoundland). Risk Management of Autonomous Marine Systems. Supervisory team: Prof. Neil Bose , Dr. Ting Zhou, Dr. Worakanok Thanyamanta (Memorial University); Dr. Mario P. Brito (UoS).
Past PhD students:
Loh Tzu Yang (University of Tasmania). Risk Management of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Operations in Antarctica
Mohammed Al-Mhdawi (University of Southampton). Construction Risk Management of Developing Countries under Extreme Conditions.
Andrew Rawson (University of Southampton). Intelligent Geospatial Analytics for Maritime Risk Assessment
Xi Chen (Memorial University of NewFoundland). Risk Management of Autonomous Marine Systems. Supervisory team: Prof. Neil Bose, Prof. Faisal Khan, Dr. Ting Zhou (Memorial University); Dr. Mario P. Brito (UoS).
Research projects
Completed projects
Publications
Teaching
Biography
Professor Brito works in the interface of statistics, science and engineering. His background is in engineering systems design. From year 2000 to 2005, Professor Brito worked as systems and dynamics engineer at BAe Systems and at Stirling Dynamics. Here he developed dynamic simulation models to support the design of several systems, for example, the A380 aircraft manual fuel transfer system, the oil and gas hydraulic control system of several production fields (Simian, Saphire, Sequoia fields and others). Following his PhD at the University of Bristol on risk management of safety critical systems assurance, Prof. Brito joined the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) at Southampton in 2008 as a Research fellow. Whilst working for NOC, Prof. Brito was project manager for the Marine Autonomous Systems in Support of Marine Observations (MASSMO) project, which had a capital budget of approximately £800K and also the programme manager for phase 1 of the Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) on Adaptive Autonomous Ocean Sampling Networks (£1.45M). In addition, Prof. Brito was the NOC Principle Investigator (PI) for the Horizon 2020 project BRIDGES (Euro 1.8M) and leader of Work-Package 7. Prof. Brito was the PI of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership project with ASV Ltd (£166K) on risk and reliability methods tailored to unmanned marine surface vehicles (UMSVs). This project underpinned the impact case submitted for REF2021 for which Prof. Brito is the leading author.
Prof. Brito has conducted several risk analysis of complex systems, including the risk analysis of autonomous vehicles deployed in extreme environments, such as under ice in arctic and antractic environments. He was the risk analyst of the Autosub3 autonomous vehicle set of missions in Antarctica, underneath the Pine Isle glacier in 2009. In this campaign Autosub3 travelled a total of 500Km underneath the ice. Prof. Brito was also the risk analyst for the ISE Explorer mission in the arctic in 2010 and 2011. In 2010, the ISE Explorer travelled a total of 1000Kms underneath sea ice. To these days these are the longest missions carried out by an autonomous vehicle underneath ice shelf and sea ice. Prof. Brito has led several accident investigations and he has acted as the independent reviewer for large engineering programmes. He is a Programme Committee member of the EEA Blue Growth Programme under the topic of "research, science and technology", managed by the Director General for Maritime Policy, Portugal.
Prof. Brito joined the University of Southampton in 2015. Prof. Brito led the validation of the MSc in Risk Management. He was the MSc Programme leader from 2018 to 2022. Prof. Brito teaches Project Risk Management and Quantitative Methods for Risk Management.
He is a member of specialised academic and industry societies. He serves as member of the Editorial Board for the ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part A: Civil Engineering & Part B: Mechanical Engineering.
Prof. Brito was the General Chairman of the 33rd European Safety and Reliability conference in Southampton, in 2023.
In addition to research in risk analysis of autonomous systems, Professor Brito is currently researching new models for healthcare systems, aviation security and safety, tribology and space systems.