Adaptive decision-making for civil infrastructure systems and communities exposed to evolving risks

摘要

Civil infrastructure systems and communities are continually subjected to changes in environmental and urban settings, evolving expectations and preferences of the public, tightening budgets, and unpredictable political circumstances over their service lives. Conventional decision methods, which determine optimal strategies based on stationary risk assessments and current knowledge, are not well suited for infrastructure systems/communities situated in evolving environments. There is a growing need to account for such evolutions in life-cycle risk assessment through adaptable, learning-based decision-making. Adaptive decision-making is a structured process of learning, improving understanding, and ultimately adapting management decisions in a systematic and efficient way, aimed at reducing uncertainties over the course of the management timeframe. This approach to risk management holds great potential for dealing with future challenges, by explicitly recognizing situational evolutions and improving decisions through learning.