Critical Review of Sustainability, Resilience, and Their Unifying Assessments for Civil Infrastructure Systems
Publication: Construction Research Congress 2022
ABSTRACT
Due to rapid depletion of natural resources, and increase in frequency and magnitude of natural disasters, sustainability and resilience are becoming vital concepts. As both concepts are crucial to sustain an infrastructure for longer duration, their concurrent assessment with a unifying approach is inevitable. Review of existing literatures revealed the lack of a single effective systematic framework that can simultaneously assess these two concepts while designing an infrastructure, which is the main knowledge gap in the literature. Specifically, the major gap in literature is the lack of an effective unification framework can accurately quantify and unify sustainability, resilience, and their indicators. Another challenge in the unification of sustainability and resilience is to accurately establish their interrelationship, because a single decision could reinforce one and undermine another. Additionally, quantification of various dimensions of both concepts, especially dimensions dealing with qualitative parameters, is another challenging task for their effective unification. Moreover, most literatures analyze sustainability and resilience separately rather than with an integrated perspective, which is why the design becomes less effective than it should have been. The scope of this study includes: (1) critical assessments of the concept of sustainability and resilience of civil infrastructure systems and difficulties in their quantification; (2) exploring complexity of their inter-relationship and major issues in their unification; and (3) identifying new factors to be considered for their unification in case of buildings. The study contributes toward a better understanding of the key challenges in the unification of sustainability and resilience for civil infrastructure systems.
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Construction Research Congress 2022
Pages: 288 - 298
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Published online: Mar 7, 2022
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