Evaluating Contributions of Emerging Technologies to Civil Infrastructure System Resilience. I: A Decision-Making Workflow

Adopting emerging technologies (ETs) and enhancing civil infrastructure (CI) system resilience is a coupled process spanning technological, organizational, social, and economic dimensions, which concern both CI stakeholders and ET providers. To this end, no unified tool provides a decision-making aid on if and how a promising ET contributes to the resilience of an infrastructure system. This paper presents a decision-making workflow to evaluate an ET’s contribution to CI system resilience, which takes the form of a logic graph with breakdown scenarios. Using this workflow, an evaluator can identify the contribution of an ET and attribute it to one or more of five resilience properties, including resourcefulness, robustness, redundancy, rapidity, and an extended property- responsiveness. One case study of applying this workflow to a community’s water distribution system proves its effectiveness. The analytical capacity evaluation and a comprehensive set of applications of this methodology are presented in Part II of this two-part set of papers.