Risk-based decision making for sustainable and resilient infrastructure

Published

June 2, 2016

Author(s)

Therese P. McAllister, Zoubir Lounis

Abstract

The development of sustainable and resilient infrastructure systems is a challenging task that involves a broad range of economic, social and environmental performance indicators, which need to be considered over the system life cycle. Conventional decision-making approaches for design and management of infrastructure systems plan to anticipate and resist governing failure events but may be vulnerable to rare unforeseen but extreme events. Considerable and numerous sources of uncertainties are associated with the life cycle performance of structural infrastructure facilities, which require the use of a risk-informed decision making approach to assess their risks of failure and identify cost-effective strategies to manage risk through a combination of different mitigation measures. This paper proposes a framework for risk-informed decision-making for the life cycle performance of structural infrastructure facilities that includes consideration of sustainability and resilience. The sustainability and resilience of structural systems are achieved by ensuring they have the required resistance to small perturbations that lead to cumulative damage as well as the required adaptive capacity to withstand large perturbations. The proposed approach is illustrated on two examples of infrastructure systems that illustrate the design for sustainability and resilience of infrastructure systems.

Citation

Journal of Structural Engineering-ASCE

Pub Type

Journals

Keywords

Infrastructure, sustainable, resilient, risk-based decision making

Citation

McAllister, T. and Lounis, Z. (2016), Risk-based decision making for sustainable and resilient infrastructure, Journal of Structural Engineering-ASCE (Accessed February 2, 2026)