Delivering Transportation Infrastructure Resilience: Research and Development Opportunities and Needs

 In my previous post I explored the connection of a resilient transportation infrastructure system to the ongoing infrastructure funding gap. Three strategic thrusts were laid out related to policy, funding and reducing life cycle costs. In this post I will lay out some of the areas where more analysis, thought leadership and research and development are required. Let me begin by broadly looking at pre-event and post-event resilience needs before delving deeper into the research areas associated with each of these three strategic thrusts.

The items highlighted are not intended to be exhaustive but rather suggestive of the work to be done and the importance of investing not just in concrete and steel but also ideas, analysis and even some fundamental research in an area which does not carry some of the appeal of nanotech, biotech and so forth.

Pre-Event Resilience

Pre-event resilience requires us to embrace new perspectives and in turn will require us to develop new frameworks, foundational ideas, and tools. These are discussed below. Pre-event resilience requires us to model future trajectories that may be catastrophic in nature. Life cycle planning must be the new norm, including heavy consideration of risks and uncertainties. Perspectives cannot be project by project or asset by asset but rather reflect the systems nature of resilience. Portfolio, enterprise and community views matter more.

Resilience as well as fragility cascade through systems, following linked processes and value chains that must be carefully mapped. Despite our best pre-event resilience efforts we must recognize that they can be overwhelmed. This drives us to think carefully about required recovery levels and time frames. Recovery time objectives lead to a new construct of resilience performance standards, recognizing that resilience may be accomplished through a combination of physical, response, operating and maintenance mechanisms. The link between state of good repair and resilience is strong and therefore relies of adequately closing the infrastructure financing gap.

Post-Event Resilience

Post-event resilience is founded on pre-event foundations, frameworks, state-of-good-repair and training. On closer examination we are called to recognize the existence of a transition phase (post response) in addition to the inevitable recovery phase. How we implement recovery must better recognize that established models for construction must change in the post recovery period even while other frameworks seek to regain pre-event postures. We must develop a Resilience Code and recognize that logistics becomes a key constraint.

Resilience imperatives drive us to consider new approaches to policy, funding and life cycle cost reduction. In turn these imperatives open the door to new research needs and opportunities that may be thought of along the three strategic thrusts to closing the infrastructure funding gap.

Policy Oriented Research Needs & Opportunities

Research supporting new policy frameworks to be considered would include new project prioritization methodologies that address portfolio design where investments may be characterized as a mix of maintenance, productivity, growth and innovation. Discovering the classes of factors to be considered in prioritization is essential as well developing the tools for scenario and risk based multivariate optimization under uncertainty.

Strategies to improve owner and project readiness require better development as do methodologies to reduce optimism bias. Value pricing and rationing mechanism must be better understood as well as the impacts of policy so that we may remove counterproductive policy, legislative and regulatory handcuffs

Funding & Finance Research Needs & Opportunities

A wide range of research avenues open up as we think more deeply about life cycle funding and financing and infrastructure systems. These include:

• Barriers and solutions to multi-year capital budgeting
• State of good repair (SGR) sinking fund mechanisms
• Covenant disparities between muni and private infrastructure financing (SGR; coverage ratios)
• Rationing strategies and economic benefits
• Multi-infrastructure policy frameworks (longitudinal utilities)
• Capital market mechanisms (refinancing risk; tenor)
• Federal tool performance and required levels
• Infrastructure tax policy
• Resilience insurance for infrastructure systems

Life Cycle Performance & Cost Research Needs & Opportunities

Life cycle performance and cost research may present the greatest scope for improvement in both meeting our resilience needs within the funding constraints that can be reasonably expected to persist. We must better understand the nature of large programs and projects rethinking how we move from a current paradigm where two out of three fail. Project management theory breaks down at scale.

Dramatic improvement in the capital construction phase and concomitant reduction in CAPEX costs will enable the necessary investments in resilience. These required reductions will require new insights into performance based standards (PBS) incorporating considerations associated with an expanded basis of design tightly linking technical requirements with the realities of construction means and methods. Practices and tools for assessing PBS and the strategies to meet their requirements are also required.

Additional areas of CAPEX related research and development include:

• Adoption of new delivery models (remove barriers)
• Restructured industry model (vertical integration)
• Manufacture vs bespoke build
• Revisit design margins but also consider resilience
• Changed risk/liability regimes – product vs professional or personal

While improvements in CAPEX costs may be top of mind for many, the bigger payoffs come in delivering reductions in cost throughout the life cycle. Research can drive OPEX cost reductions from new processes, materials, chemistry (carbonation vs hydration of concrete). Dynamic real time condition assessment coupled with a strengthened focus on enterprise asset management requirements, data analytics, strategies have the potential to be game changing.

Final Thoughts

Improving the resilience of our critical infrastructure requires addressing the persistent infrastructure funding gap. In doing so the potential of achieving greater resilience may come coupled with lower life cycle costs. A robust research agenda is required, focused on transformation, challenging both prevailing theory and practice.