Resilient Geotechnical Infrastructure Asset Management

The concept of sustainability and resilience has gained significant importance in the recent years in the infrastructure engineering industry. Key challenges currently faced by the infrastructure industry worldwide include obsolescence, growing demands, climate change, increased vulnerability, demand for multi-functionality and growing interdependencies between different asset types. With the recent changes in the economic, social and environmental scenarios, there is an increasing pressure to develop robust, flexible and multifunctional asset management solutions that not only suit the needs of present but also ensure that they are safe, secure and resilient to what the future may hold. Ultimately all infrastructure assets interact with the ground and their integrity relies substantially on the performance of geotechnical assets. Hence, making geotechnical asset management a critical starting point in future-proofing the infrastructure network.

The paper highlights the need to devise resilient asset management solutions. The paper focuses on two transport modes namely highways and railways and aims to present an asset management framework, which will test the resiliency of current geotechnical solutions to the plausible conditions of the future. The proposed asset management framework will enable strategic decision makers to evaluate the resilience potential of proposed asset management solutions in the light of future conditions with varying socio-economic and environmental patterns.