Climate Change Influence on Priority Setting for Transportation Infrastructure Assets
Publication: Journal of Infrastructure Systems
Volume 19, Issue 1
Abstract
Transportation infrastructure could be vulnerable to local manifestations of global climate change, such as storm frequencies and durations of seasons. To adapt, transportation agencies need methodologies for reprioritizing their assets subject to the new sources of vulnerability. Prioritizing assets is nontrivial when criteria assessments and owner/operator preferences are considered in conjunction with the possible climate scenarios. Few efforts to date have addressed these scenarios in a priority setting for infrastructure asset management in the literature. This paper extends a scenario-based multicriteria decision framework that can assist decision makers in effectively allocating limited resources to adapt transportation assets to a changing climate. The framework is demonstrated with one of the most susceptible metropolitan transportation systems in the United States, the Hampton Roads region in coastal southeastern Virginia. First, the high-level goals of a long-range transportation plans are used in a traditional multicriteria analysis to generate a baseline prioritization of assets. Next, several scenarios that incorporate and combine a variety of climate conditions are identified. Finally, the scenarios are used to adjust the initial criteria weighting, which results in several reprioritizations of the assets. The results help to identify the most influential scenarios and characterize the sensitivity of the baseline prioritization across multiple scenarios. With these results, additional scientific and investigative efforts can be focused effectively to study and understand the influential scenarios.
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Acknowledgments
This study is funded by FHWA (Project No. 136780). The authors are grateful for the support from the project team, comprised of experts from the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission, the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization (Metropolitan Planning Organization), and the Virginia Department of Transportation, in particular Ben MacFarlane. The authors would like to thank Mike Fitch of the Virginia Center for Transportation Innovation and Research (VCTIR) for meeting and summarizing the opinions from the VDOT expert panel (Dwayne Cook, John Jacobs, and Jack McCambridge) to identify critical assets and fill out the analysis workbook. The authors give special thanks to Dr. Christopher J. Karvetski for consulting on the methodology and to Ari Daniels for technical editing.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Infrastructure Systems
Volume 19 • Issue 1 • March 2013
Pages: 36 - 46
Copyright
© 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Aug 19, 2011
Accepted: Jan 12, 2012
Published online: May 29, 2012
Published in print: Mar 1, 2013
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