System identification in resilience management of historical bridges

Transportation infrastructures play an essential role for sustainable and resilient societal developments. In case of an infrastructure failure, such as a partial of full collapse of a bridge, the failure event may cause further cascading failures in the transportation network and lead to severe disruptions of societal functionality. The identification of optimal strategies for the management of critical infrastructure systems through inspections, monitoring, maintenance, repairs, strengthening and renewals, comprises a common but non-trivial challenge for asset owners and operators. To support assets integrity managers in this process the JCSS (2008) has issued a guideline on risk informed decision making for engineered facilities and systems with a focus on the main components of the system identification pertaining to decision analysis. With this basis, the present paper identifies and proposes a novel and generic framework for system identification in the context of resilience management of bridges with a special focus on heritage structures subject to disturbance events such as natural hazards, excessive degradation, failure and accidents and human and organizational errors. The framework addresses the decision situations before, during and after disturbance events with special emphasis directed on the system characteristics of relevance for resilience management and how information about these characteristics may be represented in terms of resilience indicators. In addition, the suggested framework directs emphasis on the role of management of information utilized in support of decision making.