MS-82 Objective Resilience Management: Trends and Case Studies

Fariborz M Tehrani, CSU Fresno Lyles College of Engineering
Mohammed Ettouney

Civil infrastructure resilience includes several multidisciplinary components such as robustness, resourcefulness, recovery, and redundancy, sometimes referred to as the 4Rs. Achieving optimal resilient performance on an asset and community levels is not an easy task. Because of this, stakeholders need to follow a comprehensive resilience management process from ground up in order to have a reasonable chance of achieving such optimality. Resilience management, similar to risk management, include five components. First, the stakeholder needs to assess the state of resilience given a natural or man-made hazard or threat. Second, decide whether to accept this assessment. If it is decided that the assessed resilience level is not acceptable, a resilience improvement program should be initiated to bring the assessed resilience up to an acceptable level. Unfortunately, a universal fact is that the passage of time has a tendency to reduce physical capacity (aging effects) and/or operational efficiency (budget cuts, societal changes, etc.) while demands from infrastructure tend to increase (e.g. traffic, intensity of storms, climate change). Those universal truths will have the inescapable result of resilience reduction as time goes on. This will necessitate the need for resilience monitoring, the fourth component in a comprehensive resilience management effort, to ensure that resilience remains within an acceptable level. Finally, all of those activities need to be communicated between all stakeholders, including the legislators and the public to maintain public confidence as well as the appropriate level of project funding. This resilience communications effort is the fifth, and perhaps most important, resilience management component. The proposed mini-symposium will include presentations that cover some of resilience management components, either individually, or integrally. In addition, presentations regarding lessons learned from recent applications of resilience management (or any of its components) will also be expected.