TRANSRISK paved the pathways to innovation in resilience engineering by providing a breakthrough in three main areas of research and advancing the current state of the art as follows.
- Delivered a primer in resilience engineering by establishing a novel resilience assessment framework for transport infrastructure that accounts for the nature of the hazards, including projections for exacerbation of effects due to climate change, their sequence, the loss of functionality, the recovery strategies and their rapidity and associated losses.
- Developed adaptable three-dimensional fragility models illustrated in novel fragility surfaces for facilitating the assessment of the vulnerability of transport systems of assets (SoA) exposed to multiple hazards.
- Built advanced four-dimensional numerical models of transport SoA subjected to critical hazards, which included the three dimensions of the SoA geometry, but also the evolution of models due to deterioration and/or accumulation of natural hazard stressors on the asset throughout their lifetime.
Natural hazards, such as ground movements, debris flow, earthquakes, and floods are major threats to infrastructure, aggravated due to climate change and consequent accumulation of damage and deterioration. However, operability of infrastructure underpins societies and businesses, and as such it is of paramount importance for the sustainable development of economies. Thus, the vulnerability and resilience analysis of critical infrastructure exposed to natural hazards is a key area of research worldwide. However, a systematic and accurate representation of the performance of transport assets subjected to multiple hazards is still missing. More importantly, infrastructure assets comprise Systems of Assets, i.e. a combination of interdependent assets exposed not to one, but to multiple hazards, depending on the environment within which these reside. Thus, reliable assessment of the vulnerability of, and the associated risks to, transport SoA subjected to multiple hazards is of paramount importance. The proposed resilience-based assessment of transport infrastructure is in support of decision-making processes around adaptation, mitigation, and recovery planning in respect of geotechnical and climatic hazards.
The diverse yet complementary expertise of the Fellow (Dr S Argyroudis), the Supervisor (Dr SA Mitoulis), the Host Organisation (University of Surrey), and the Partner Organisations (Transport Research Laboratory/ Prof MG Winter, TRL and the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute/ Prof AM Kaynia, NGI) worked perfectly and delivered way beyond the initially expected outcome of the TRANSRISK project. This multi-sectoral nature of the project also included interaction with transportation authorities, stakeholders and industrialists (e.g. ARUP, Highways England, Network Rail, JBA Trust) to produce meaningful and practical research results.
