Chapter 4 - Engineering and system design for resilience

Abstract

Engineering, construction, and maintenance practices for civil infrastructure system have evolved to reflect routine and expected conditions. Increasingly, however, there has been a greater effort to incorporate the needs and conditions associated with periodic, less-frequent, and unexpected disruptive events into routine practice. These efforts are broadly classified as resilient-oriented engineering. And while catastrophic disasters tend to capture most of the attention, ideal resilience practices are also easily adaptable to counter minor and routinely occurring disruptions that frequently result in travel delays and inconvenience. This chapter discusses these emerging and evolving engineering practices as well as the standards, policies, as well specialized approaches that complement them, to more resiliently plan, design, construct, operate, and maintain transportation infrastructure systems. Since there are no universal accepted methods to achieve resilience, this chapter also examines research and emerging policy creation as these will likely point the way toward the resiliently engineering systems and methods of the future.