Adaptive pathways for disaster-resilient infrastructure: resilience assessment as a fundamental requirement

Built infrastructure must be resilient to prevail in the face of disasters. Adopting strategic options and policies for disaster risk mitigation and community resilience enhancement are conditioned on accurate, comprehensive and systematic disaster risk assessment of infrastructure. The pathways promote incremental adaptation and consider post-disaster requirements through a proper resilience assessment. Such an approach is a prerequisite for implementing pathways for disaster-resilient infrastructure but is currently not prevalent. The present study carries out resilience assessment from a seismic risk reduction consideration, incorporating functionality loss and subsequent recovery for a representative archetypical commercial building. Various scenarios of pre- and post-disaster preparedness, planning and mitigation options are considered to provide deeper understanding of pathways. Assessments are conducted in accordance with the state-of-the-art performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE) framework. The results are compared using a range of resilience metrics. The impact of an engineering intervention, viz., improvement to non-structural performance, a management intervention, viz., mitigation of post-disaster repair impedances, and their combination are demonstrated and quantified. The study shows how various pre-disaster planning, preparedness strategies and post-disaster management options influence resilience and that they can be combined to enhance infrastructure resilience. Multiple options are presented for efficient decision-making by stakeholders and policymakers to deal with uncertainties during disasters. The study advocates embracing the resiliency mindset and involving multiple stakeholders in risk-informed decision-making.