ABSTRACT
Resilience is widely used by both academics and practitioners to capture the capacity of physical infrastructure to provide service after significant events such as extreme weather, operational failures, and manmade or technological impacts. In the United States, interest in resilience is increasing with the growing awareness of the potential impacts of climate change, events such as Superstorm Sandy in the mid-Atlantic region, and increasing emphasis on performance based management in transportation infrastructure legislation, such as the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) and the Fix America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act. In this paper we provide a synthesis of the resilience literature relevant to pavement management. Then, to demonstrate the applicability of the concepts, we use two examples of resilience measures and apply these to pavements at the project level. The first example applies the concepts of robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness and rapidity. The second example uses the functionality over time as a measure of resiliency. In both cases the measures are applied to a section of pavement in Delaware (USA) that has been subject to frequent flooding and degradation over time. The results illustrate the application of resilience measures to a pavement segment at two different temporal scales— specific flooding events and progressive degradation. The results provide insight into the impacts of different strategies for ensuring the functioning of the pavements prior to, during and immediately following an event including the limitations of project level analysis.
