OP2331 A Decision Support System for Improving Maintenance and Resiliency of Infrastructure under Climate Change Impacts

NERC ONE Planet DTP

Climate change can significantly impact deterioration and useful life of infrastructure. The repercussions of these impacts need to be considered in their maintenance. Various methods have been developed for modelling infrastructure deterioration, including physical models, statistical methods, and data-driven methods (e.g., artificial intelligence), which primarily focus on identifying deterioration rates and predicting the maintenance requirements. Climate change can accelerate the deterioration rate of the infrastructure, which should be analysed in the models.

While taking such analysis into account, other factors such as the criticality and interdependency of infrastructure assets, and maintenance budget and resource constraints need to be considered for an effective maintenance management. Therefore, this research aims to improve maintenance and resiliency of infrastructure by developing a decision support system (DSS) for considering climate change impacts, and uncertainties surrounding the decision variables.

This DSS includes several elements:

1. A model that can predict the impact of climate change on the infrastructure and the resultant failures.
2. A risk analysis approach to quantify the probability and impact of the failures, and prioritise the maintenance operations based on criticality and interpendency of infrastructures
3. A maintenance operation simulation to model the maintenance activities considering maintenance budget and resource constraints.

The proposed DSS can provide insight for the infrastructure asset managers to consider climate impacts in their maintenance decisons, and more effectively plan for maintenance activities given limited budget and resources. The result of this research will lead to improvement of infrastructure resiliency and reduce the risk of significant failures for critical infrastructure assets due to climate change-induced disasters. The successful candidate will gain knowledge about climate change impacts on aging infrastructure, simulation modelling and infrastructure maintenance processes.

Key Research Gaps and Questions:

How climate change can impact resiliency of infrastructure? How to manage maintenance of infrastructure to improve their resiliency considering climate change impacts, and uncertainties surrounding the decision variables?

Prerequisites:

Climate Change Analysis, Risk Analysis, Data Analytics For more information, please contact Dr SeyedReza RazaviAlavi ([Email Address Removed]).