Infrastructure Assessment

Engineers are being challenged to make critical decisions in response to crisis situations occurring around the globe on a seemingly daily basis. The nature of these crises varies widely and can include military missions as well as humanitarian operations in response to hurricanes, tsunamis, fires, and earthquakes. With thousands of lives hanging in the balance, timely and successful responses to these emergencies often depend on the optimal use of the existing horizontal infrastructure, such as roads, airfields, and railroads, in the affected area. Engineers must provide solutions quickly on the basis of limited data, particularly for unanticipated emergency situations. For military operations, options and alternatives are imperative to the success of a mission. This paper describes an analytical approach to the management of uncertainty because of limited data that provides a solution based on seasonal variability in material strengths, spatial variability in material strengths, and spatial variability in pavement layer thicknesses. An example scenario for an airfield is presented to illustrate techniques for analysis of the structural capacity of pavements of marginal quality and quantification of the uncertainty of the results. Show References