Assessment and management of infrastructure resilience  

Infrastructure systems play a vital role for sustainable development of economy, but they can be vulnerable to disruptions. It is important to ensure adequate supply of roads, public transport, power, and clean water at all times. Nevertheless, various disruptions to our infrastructure systems are of critical concern. One should still remember vividly the impact on the European transportation network and the associated knock-on effects on economy due to the severe spell of winter weather in December 2010 and January 2013. We can also never forget the devastating loss in Japan brought upon by the Fukushima earthquake in 2011. Resilience should hence take a significant role in planning and policy making. The transition to a more sustainable economy and built environment call for improved policy making tools for infrastructure planning.

Infrastructure resilience is a complex and multidisciplinary issue. Two major shortcomings in current infrastructure assessment and management are: 1) failure of capturing the interdependence between different system components; 2) failure of capturing the responses of humans to infrastructure disruptions. This pilot study aims to bring together experts from different disciplines, gain deeper insight into infrastructure resilience from a multidisciplinary perspective, and identify research activities that should be done in the future.

This pilot study is planned over August 2013 – July 2014, led by three researchers (Chow, Nasiri, and Siddiqui) from different backgrounds: civil engineering, urban planning, and statistical science whose expertise are also on different kinds of infrastructures: transport, energy, and water.