Delivering Safe, Cost-Effective, Sustainable Civil Infrastructure Projects under Conditions of Non-Stationarity: Fid-Bau Portal

Delivering Safe, Cost-Effective, Sustainable Civil Infrastructure Projects under Conditions of Non-Stationarity

Wallace, Bill / Ellison, Dave / Daugherty, Ryan

This paper proposes, describes and diagrams a methodology for planning, designing, constructing, and operating civil infrastructure projects for an operating environment that is changing substantially and in ways that are not readily predictable. Its purpose is to offer a timely answer to the engineer’s follow-on question, “How do I deliver a safe, reliable and cost-effective infrastructure project in the face of these significant changes?” An extension of existing civil infrastructure project delivery practices, this methodology addresses these changing conditions by incorporating appropriate levels of robustness, resilience, redundancy, and adaptability into the project design. Global climate change, the result of the burning of fossil fuels, is altering significantly the statistical properties of the environmental design parameters engineers use in infrastructure design. Consequently, long-held design assumptions such as ambient temperatures, sea levels, storm intensity, and the likely extent of droughts and heat waves are no longer reliable. Unknowingly, today’s engineers are planning, designing, and constructing infrastructure projects that will not be able to cope with future operating conditions. Thus, it is critical that the engineering profession devise a way of delivering projects that accounts for these new and significantly changing environmental conditions. Adopting this or some modification to this methodology is essential if civil infrastructure projects are to function as specified, and be protective of public health, safety, and well-being.