ABSTRACT
The main responsibility of infrastructure owners and the engineering community is to ensure safety of the infrastructure users. While this has been the primary goal of the civil infrastructure community since its inception, costs of building and operating infrastructure also have to be reasonable. The confluence of safety/performance at reasonable costs has been emerging as the infrastructure asset management goal due to the recent increase (in magnitude and frequency) of abnormal hazards attributed to climate change. At the same time, financial and personnel resources to maintain the said infrastructures are constrained. Recently, performance is not limited to safety, but uninterrupted mobility and reliability also have gained attention as required performance measures. Because of these emerging factors and limitations, the need for optimizing performance and costs (from both initial capital expenses and life cycle viewpoints) of infrastructures is becoming more important than ever. Some of the recognized factors, which can affect both performance and costs, among others, are safety, security, constructability, serviceability, durability, maintainability, economy, and aesthetics. All these factors need to be considered with a backdrop of events/processes (hazards) that are responsible for infrastructure deterioration. But these hazards vary greatly in their attributes even though they all have one common feature-they all degrade the performance. This will ultimately cost the stakeholders; sometimes, these costs can be immense. Traditionally, the stakeholders dealt with these hazards one at a time. There is, however, a realization that such an approach is not optimal (both from performance or cost viewpoints) and a multihazard (MH) approach is needed. This book will examine and discuss this issue in depth.
