Resilience of aging structures and infrastructure systems with emphasis on seismic resilience of bridges and road networks: Review

Risk assessment and mitigation programs have been carried out over the last decades in the attempt to reduce transportation infrastructure downtime and post-disaster recovery costs. Recently, the concept of resilience gained increasing importance in design, assessment, maintenance, and rehabilitation structures and infrastructure systems, particularly bridges and transportation networks, exposed to natural and man-made hazards. In the field of disaster mitigation, frameworks have been proposed to provide a basis for development of qualitative and quantitative models quantifying the functionality and resilience at various scales, including components, groups and systems within infrastructure networks and communities. In these frameworks, the effects of aging and environmental aggressiveness must be explicitly considered, affecting the structural performance and functionality of civil infrastructure systems. Significant efforts have been made to incorporate risk and resilience assessment frameworks into informed decision making to decide how to best use resources to minimize the impact of hazards on civil infrastructure systems. This review paper is part of these efforts. It presents an overview of the main principles and concepts, methods and strategies, advances and accomplishments in the field of life-cycle reliability, risk and resilience of structures and infrastructure systems, with emphasis on seismic resilience of bridges and road networks.