Research areas

Ibsen’s research interests are focused on risk to infrastructure. Currently, for a project at the University of Southern Denmark, he undertakes research in risk governance in sociotechnical systems. In collaboration with the Centre of Maritime Health and Society, he will provide scientific input to the Denmark’s first artificial energy island. An energy island serves as a hub for connecting and distributing power from the surrounding offshore wind farms. The artificial energy island will be located in the North Sea 80 km off the west coast.  The energy island is expected to have a full capacity of 10 GW. The energy island will serve both Danish and European interests and will affect the public. These characteristics make this project a considerable and one-off socio-technical system requiring a customised risk governance framework. We will describe such a risk governance framework and evaluate some aspects of it using the experiences gathered from the project. The risk governance framework will introduce new concepts and tools to the risk management field.

In collaboration with the Research Centre for Arctic Petroleum Exploration, ARCEx, (a 16 academic and industrial partners consortium funded by the Norwegian Research Council under the grant agreement 228107), Ibsen has contributed to understanding risk connected to exploration and operation in the north (2021-2023).

In 2016, he successfully finalised the appointment to the BENEFIT project (a 14 academic and industrial partners research project funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme under grant agreement 635973). In this project, probabilistic causation models that jointly consider project governance, business models, and funding and financing factors enabling transport projects’ performance goals to be achieved, were developed.

In 2012, Ibsen completed his doctorate studies at Universiteit Twente in the Netherlands. He has been using the Bayesian networks framework for the quantification of risk in tunnelling, slope stability analysis and project governance. He is civil engineer from the National University of Colombia.