Resiliency in Geotechnical Asset Management: A Risk-Based Quantitative Approach-Paper

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The paper proposes a quantitative, risk-informed framework for assessing resilience in geotechnical asset management. Resilience can be evaluated for an individual asset or for a transportation network of interacting assets, whose performance measures and vulnerabilities may differ. For example, a deteriorated culvert can worsen flooding and reduce the capacity of the embankment and road it supports.<br /><br />The framework has five stages: define the assets and their network relationships; identify disruptive events; analyze asset or system performance over time; quantify resilience; and select improvement strategies. Events provide the context for assessment, rather than being used to calculate expected performance across probability distributions. Asset performance may be measured using indicators such as deformation, factor of safety, or probability of failure, and assessed against relevant limit states.<br /><br />Resilience is quantified by considering the magnitude and duration of performance loss after disruption. The proposed measure reflects cumulative performance loss over time, including recovery and any lasting reduction in performance. The authors emphasize that damage can shorten an asset’s remaining service life even if its measured performance returns to its pre-event level.<br /><br />Improvement strategies aim to reduce cumulative performance loss, through reducing disruptive loads or improving robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, and recovery speed. The framework is intended to support more consistent, data-driven resilience assessments and to connect asset-level responses with the collective performance of transportation networks.

Keywords

geotechnical asset management

resilience assessment

risk-informed framework

transportation network

asset vulnerability

culvert flooding

performance loss

recovery speed

limit states

cumulative resilience