IABSE Webinar: Resilience-Based Management of Bridge Portfolios in Seismic Regions

Webinar details and Registration Link: Click Here

After registering you shall receive the Zoom meeting link, before the webinar.

Speaker: Prof. Anastasios Sextos, PhD, MASCE, FHEA, Professor of Earthquake Engineering, Head of Earthquake and Geotechnical Engineering Research Group, University of Bristol, UK.

Roadway infrastructure (primarily bridges, overpasses and junctions) form an interconnected and complex system of assets that is designed to facilitate the continuous provision of services essential to the functioning of society, especially in highly urbanized regions. Resilience of this system, namely its ability to withstand, adapt to, and rapidly recover after a disruptive event, is therefore vital for the safety, security and prosperity of our communities. This presentation focuses on two of the most important challenges towards holistic disaster risk mitigation and management: (a) quantification of roadway infrastructure resilience in a way that is meaningful and applicable for informed decision-making and (b) rigorous, yet computationally efficient, assessment of superstructure and its supporting subsoil as a holistic, dynamic and interacting system. The outcomes of several research projects will be critically reviewed focusing on the reliable consideration of epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties propagating from the hazard to the structural component level, the structure and the network level. RETIS-Risk is such a multi-disciplinary project that considers the above aspects of highway network resilience to seismic loading and establishes a comprehensive, multi-criterion framework for mitigating the overall loss experienced by the community after an earthquake event. Vulnerability of bridges and overpasses is assessed in detail considering dynamic soil-structure interaction (SSI) effects. Loss is decoupled into direct (i.e., arising from structural/geotechnical damage) and indirect, associated with the travel delays of the network users, as well as the wider socio-economic consequences in the affected area. Given the computational demand for large scale finite element modelling associated with dynamic SSI problems, recent advances in reduced order modelling will be presented next. This work relates to multi-objective optimization of Lumped Parameter Models (LMP) and permits consideration of frequency- and intensity-dependent SSI in the time domain. The talk will further present an application of the above computational scheme for the case of a large highway network in Greece and conclude with a spectrum of ideas for future research in the field of structural, earthquake and resilience engineering.