Infrastructure Resilience: 10 Challenges

<ns3:p>„Resilience Engineering” (RE) is a new emerging engineering science. Its importance is rapidly growing because of the rising size and complexity of infrastructure objects. The subject of this science is resilience of infrastructure objects understood as an emerging feature related to their ability to survive and work in an evolving environment and outside of the envelope of their design assumptions.The paper’s goal is to interest Polish scholars and designers in resilience and to propose 10 research challenges, to be addressed to create a theoretical foundation necessary to use RE in designing and analysis of existing infrastructure objects.In the paper’s first chapter the necessity to develop RE was justified and an example was provided demonstrating how the lack of resilience of a bridge structure for collisions with large ocean container ships may cause huge economic and social losses. In the next chapter, was provided a working definition of infrastructure objects resilience and its understanding in the context of complex systems. Also, the notions “Safety” and “Resilience” were compared with appropriate examples. Next, three classes of resilience (Static, Dynamic, and Evolutionary) with examples, five levels of resilience, seven eventual resilience criteria and a resilience estimation formula were proposed. In addition to the notion of resilience, the notions of fragility of infrastructure objects and antifragility of infrastructure objects were introduced and explained using examples. In the third chapter the complexity of factors affecting resilience was discussed using a comparison of two tall building: World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City, USA and the Prudential Building in Warsaw, Poland. In the fourth chapter, ten research challenging were proposed to initiate a discussion on the future Polish resilience research. Finally, Final Remarks were presented.</ns3:p>