Risk-Based Decision Making for Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure

Abstract

The design and preservation of civil infrastructure systems have been driven, for a long time, by cost minimization while maintaining system reliability at an acceptable level. The growing concerns with aging and deteriorating infrastructures and the need to ensure resilient and sustainable infrastructures and communities require the development and use of innovative construction materials and structural systems and management practices that yield infrastructure resiliency and achieve an adequate balance between social, economic and environmental sustainability. and the emerging needs for sustainable and resilient infrastructure and communities. This paper discusses some key performance measures and approaches that can be used to assess resilience and sustainability and presents a risk-based decision-based approach to help decision-makers optimize the design, evaluation and management of infrastructures that considers all possible hazards and provides alternative risk mitigation strategies that can be evaluated using a cost-benefit analysis, and rational criteria are presented to support the selection of the most sustainable and resilient risk mitigation strategy indicators, such as safety, serviceability, costs, traffic disruption, greenhouse gas emissions, which can be used for life cycle design of highway bridges. An example, taken from the North American context, illustrates how different design and rehabilitation approaches can contribute to achieve the sustainability of a highway bridge.