Best Practices on Advanced Condition Monitoring of Rail Infrastructure Systems

COVID-19 has just proven that transportation systems are not immunized and are vulnerable. The coronavirus causes severe consequences including step changes in travel behaviors, risk perception and avoidance, transportation operations, network policies, and real capabilities to track, monitor, and contain the virus through social distancing, quarantine, and isolation within the transport networks. These too affect the standard and practice for managing infrastructure systems. We can no longer consider or treat resilience simply for better responses to environmental hazards as a business as usual. Societal, economic, and engineering resilience has become more underlyingly critical than ever. In fact, the virus underpins the necessity to manage temporal and spatial risks through advanced condition monitoring across transportation networks, modalities, and systems. Such needs have been the key theme in this special Research Topic that is emphasized on rail infrastructure systems designed to cope with multi hazards and extreme events.