Speaker
Description
Bridge structures are key components of transport networks, enabling connections between important centers and regions of countries. Loss of their operability and functionality due to long-term deterioration or extreme hazards could cause crucial social and economic and environmental impacts. Nevertheless, no studies exist to date to optimise resilience and sustainability metrics for bridges suffering from combines climatic and anthropogenic stressors, which is the case in Ukraine, which experienced extensive destruction of its infrastructure while its climate changes rapidly. This is a capability gap that gave the motivation for this research paper. Therefore, assessment of their sustainability and resilience against natural and human-induced hazards is needed for decision-making in planning of maintenance and post-event restoration measures. Resilience analysis is required for the prediction of functionality, optimal management and sustainable development of infrastructural assets. Effective resilience and sustainability assessments are typically based on metrics, used for quantification to facilitate decision making. This study aims to analyse some of the most important and widely used resilience metrics for bridges, their potential and challenges, and combine those with sustainability metrics, such as cost, CO2 emissions and ultimately environmental impacts. The novelty of the research is the optimisation of sustainability and resilience metrics to multi-hazard stressors, in particular human-induced and climate hazard. The study covers functionality-related resilience metrics, accounted for the structural damage associated with direct losses in terms of repair cost, as well as socio-economic metrics, like environmental footprint, sustainability, and life-quality impact, etc. Application of a framework for resilience assessment was illustrated with an example of case study of post-conflict restoration of Ukrainian bridge structures. Specific focus in case study is made on disparate remote-sensing sources of information and data-driven assessments to facilitate prioritisation during reconstruction.
| Topics | Sustainable resilience of systems in the built environment |
|---|---|
| Keywords | resilience, sustainability, bridges, assessment, post-conflict recovery, Ukraine |
