Resilience-Based Design of Geotechnical Assets-PPT Presentation

PPT Presentation

Pdf Summary

The presentation advocates resilience-based design for geotechnical assets as extreme weather, climate change, aging infrastructure, and growing demand increase the likelihood and consequences of damage. Resilience should be considered at network, asset, and component levels, and includes robustness, rapid recovery, resourcefulness, and redundancy.

It distinguishes an asset’s <strong>condition</strong> (physical state), <strong>performance</strong> (ability to fulfill its intended function), and <strong>capacity</strong> (load it can withstand). Design should account for how these change over an asset’s service life. Repeated and sequential events can accumulate damage, so relying on historical loading assumptions alone may underestimate future risk. Non-stationary, data-informed scenarios and time-series simulations can help identify critical event sequences.

The proposed design philosophy progresses from deterministic design, through reliability improvements by increasing capacity or reducing uncertainty, toward a third generation of resilience-based design. This approach considers the full life cycle under uncertainty, including marginal performance, serviceability, maintenance, recovery, and economic impacts—not only ultimate failure.

A slope-stabilization case study illustrates the importance of event sequences. A typical water-table increase produced an estimated 0.6% probability of failure, a reliability index of 2.60, and a mean factor of safety of 1.51. With water-table rise associated with sequential heavy rain, failure probability increased to 7.8%, the reliability index fell to 1.37, and the mean factor of safety dropped to 1.2. An improvement raised the mean factor of safety to 1.62 and the reliability index to 3.00, reducing failure probability to 0.10%.

The presentation concludes that adaptive designs should combine future loading scenarios, asset condition and performance assessments, life-cycle planning, and scheduled maintenance and rehabilitation. Effective geotechnical asset management can extend service life and complement resilience-based design. Quantifying resilience indices remains a topic for future work.

Keywords

resilience-based design

geotechnical assets

extreme weather

climate change

asset condition

asset performance

life-cycle planning

slope stabilization

failure probability

maintenance and rehabilitation