Infrastructure resilience at the project level: considering hazard risk and uncertainty for infrastructure decisions
Date
2013
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Disasters, such as Hurricane Sandy, the Japan TÅhoku Tsunami and others, illustrate the effects of infrastructure system failure on communities. Although the idea of increasing resilience is becoming a popular response to these challenges, it can be difficult to determine exactly how to make infrastructure systems more resilient.
This thesis proposes an approach that may be used to inform decisions that strengthen infrastructure resilience. Decisions for resilience should be made by first setting performance requirements for proxy measures of resilience, such as life cycle cost, risk, time to recovery and reliability. Analysis can then be performed to determine how different decisions may meet those performance requirements even in the presence of uncertainty. Life cycle cost analysis, risk assessment and other tools can be used within this approach to model the performance of the system. Other tools such as bounding and information gap theory can be used to model the uncertainties involved in the problem. This analysis approach should be applied iteratively to better inform decisions for infrastructure resilience.
This approach can be used to determine how much to spend on resilience, what alternatives should be pursued, and what events infrastructure should be designed for. The approach allows decision makers to pursue resilience according to their own values and allows for analysis even with great uncertainty. Although this approach provides a guide to follow, there can arise many challenges in making decisions for resilient infrastructure. These challenges arise from the uncertainty and complexity involved in the interactions amongst hazards, infrastructure and society.