This lecture has three parts. The first introduces the ongoing impacts of climate change and the increasing flood challenges facing transport infrastructure systems. It also presents two critical mindsets of engineering safety management: risk and resilience – what they are and why we encourage adopting a resilience mindset to cope with extreme scenarios.
The second part demystifies the resilience of infrastructure systems by introducing the concept, attributes (4Rs), and dimensions (TOSE). This is followed by an explanation of the classic “resilience triangle curve” for infrastructure resilience assessment.
The third part illustrates a network modelling-based approach for infrastructure resilience assessment through a case study of measuring the flood resilience of the London urban rail transit systems.
The topic of analysing the resilience of infrastructure systems falls under the broad umbrella of construction management. It is an interdisciplinary topic that could cover the fields of civil engineering, systems engineering, and management science. When
introducing network modelling to simulate the structure and dynamics of
infrastructure systems, the topic further covers the knowledge of network
science, which is another academic field with theories and methods including
graph theory from mathematics, statistical mechanics from physics, data mining
and information visualization from computer science, and so on.