Dan Frangopol

• Sc.D., Dist.M.ASCE
• Chair at Lehigh University

This chapter addresses the challenges posed by climate change in structural engineering practice to advance the performance of infrastructure systems through guidelines for recommended code and standard provisions and for best engineering practices for design, rehabilitation and risk management of future climate extremes. Many climate effects in in...

Risk-informed life-cycle engineering provides a viable approach for addressing the challenges posed by climate change for developing appropriate design and management criteria for structures and infrastructure systems. The basic mathematical formulations are first presented and followed by a discussion of important factors that must be considered d...

Currently, a comprehensive management system for transportation networks incorporating bridges and pavements is still missing. In this study, both bridges and asphalt pavements are considered critical components in the connection among all nodes in the network. A framework for estimating the probabilistic life-cycle connectivity of transportation n...

In many European cities there are a considerable number of railway bridges with a minimum height above road overpasses. The number of impacts also increases on these road overpasses, which automatically results in the closure of the railway operation. A procedure supported by non-linear finite element analysis (NLFEA) and monitoring systems has be...

Field investigations after recent large earthquakes have confirmed that several structures were severely damaged and collapsed not only by the earthquake, but also by the subsequent tsunami, landslide, or fault displacement. Effect of material degradation due to chloride attack on structural performance should be considered when structures are loca...

Riverine floods have become increasingly prevalent on a global scale, posing significant risks to infrastructure systems and communities. The escalating impacts of climate change associated with the increase in rainfall intensities and frequencies necessitate the improvement of the existing design methodologies to account for the non-stationary cli...

Given the impact of climate change on the society, climate adaptation for civil structures and infrastructure systems has become an urgent task. To determine an adaptation and maintenance strategy in a rigorous manner, the influence of climate change on structures and infrastructure systems should be quantified. Risk, a performance indicator incorp...

The devastating consequences of tsunamis on coastal infrastructure have highlighted the urgent need for effective disaster risk reduction strategies. To mitigate tsunami disasters, the insurance industry plays a vital role in implementing risk transfer measures by providing financial protection against asset damage. However, the current research on...

To estimate the connectivity of a road network, it is crucial to evaluate the correlation of hazard intensities among individual bridge locations since the probability of multiple bridges being damaged simultaneously depends on the degree of this correlation. However, research on connectivity assessment of bridge networks considering spatial correl...

Curing is a crucial process during the construction phase of concrete structures, as it plays a significant role in ensuring durability and strength. During the curing process, the concrete is kept moist to allow properly hydration and hardening. This process helps to prevent cracking, increase the concrete's compressive strength, and improve its r...

The validation of behaviour of existing structures and its materials characteristics requires the application of tests and monitoring to gather information about the actual response. The comparison of the actual performance and the designed performance enables the validation of the design assumptions in terms of implied loads and materials resistan...

Sensors create synergies in monitoring. The use of sensors to determine the reaction of a tunnel cross-section or tunnel maintenance to certain rock formations and to monitor construction and functional components is common practice in tunnelling today. Sensors can detect physical effects such as deformation, strain, vibration or temperature under...

Bridges and pavements are two major infrastructure components of a transportation network providing mobility of freight and commodities for economic vitality and access to a range of users as social benefits. However, the lack of a comprehensive infrastructure management system incorporating bridges and pavements inhibits accurate performance predi...

Asphalt pavement should be represented as a series system of limit state functions associated with the international roughness index, rut depth, alligator cracking, and transverse cracking. Traditional regression-based prediction models are too simplified to account for the relationship between pavement performance and the operating conditions asso...

The estimation of investment costs of road projects is a key task at every stage of planning and implementation. From the initial project idea to detailed planning and legal approval, the costs of transport infrastructures play a decisive role for investors, authorities, and the public. Although each project is different and some deviations between...

Systematic analyses of market developments and transport trends are the basis for the evaluation of investments in transport infrastructure in common approval procedures. Traditional cost- benefit analysis (CBA) considers time savings between connected locations as a key benefit of the expansion of transport infrastructure. With reference to almost...

Risk-based disaster waste management must be established in Japan to enhance the resilience of a coastal community subjected to the anticipated Nankai Trough earthquake. This study presents a novel framework for the resilience assessment of disaster waste disposal systems with incineration facilities and bridge networks under both seismic and tsuna...

Time-variant reliability analysis is an essential computational procedure to quantify the failure probability and risk throughout the life-cycle of structures. A major challenge of time-variant reliability analysis is the computational effort and expense, especially when sampling-based methods are involved. Artificial Intelligence inspires a new pe...

Climate Change (CC) includes both global warming driven by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases and the resulting large-scale shifts in weather patterns. Although there have been previous periods of CC, since the mid-20th century humans have had an unprecedented impact on Earth's climate system and have caused changes on a global scale. One...

Infrastructure systems are subjected to deterioration throughout the duration of their life-cycle from exposure to the environment. The bridge network systems play a crucial role in urban, and their safety are highly related to the carbon emissions within the construction field. This study suggests a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach for t...

Predicting the performance and remaining service life of deteriorated reinforced concrete (RC) structures based on observational information obtained by means such as visual inspection and monitoring remains a very challenging task in the structural engineering community and the subject of this keynote paper. After experimentally studying the proce...

The colossal impact of tsunamis has been responsible for a significant loss to coastal infrastructure worldwide. However, due to the sea-level rise effects, the life-cycle risk assessment associated with the cumulative loss becomes intractable since hazards due to tsunami are time-dependent. A more accurate life-cycle tsunami risk assessment is nee...

Climate Change (CC) includes both global warming driven by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases and the resulting large-scale shifts in weather patterns. Although there have been previous periods of CC, since the mid-20th century humans have had an unprecedented impact on Earth's climate system and have caused changes on a global scale. One...

Risk assessment and mitigation programs have been carried out over the last decades in the attempt to reduce transportation infrastructure downtime and post-disaster recovery costs after seismic events. Mathematical frameworks have also been proposed to provide a basis for development of predictive models for functionality and resilience of structu...

Multitudes of algorithms have been proposed to evaluate the failure probability of components and systems. Among all these algorithms, direction sampling is a promising one. However, a major computational effort involved in direction sampling is that for each direction sample a root-searching process needs to be conducted to obtain the distance bet...

The increasing complexity of modern engineering systems has motivated a shift of research focus from component-level reliability to system reliability with interdependent components. There is a growing demand for efficient reliability methods to analyze high-dimensional systems that involve numerous dependent components and component variables. The...

This paper presents a model-based probabilistic structural identification that uses the deflection of prestressed concrete bridges (PSCBs) as observational information to perform Bayesian inference on the state variables associated with creep, structural rigidity, dead loads, shrinkage and prestress. The creep development is modeled as a stochastic...

Infrastructure systems, such as bridges, are a driver for the economic growth and sustainable development of countries. Similarly, the development of operation and maintenance strategies for infrastructure systems may aim at optimal management using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as reliability, redundancy, availability, safety, economy, en...

The immense impacts of tsunamis can inflict substantial damage on coastal infrastructure systems during their lifetime and lead to considerable economic loss. However, with the increasing intensity and variability of sea‐level rise due to climate change, evaluations of the life‐cycle tsunami risk associated with cumulative loss have become increasi...

Chloride-induced corrosion of tensile rebars in reinforced concrete (RC) structures causes cracking in the concrete surface along corroded rebars. The width of these cracks could provide valuable information for estimating the amount of steel weight loss inside concrete beams. However, an experimental investigation revealed that the distribution of...

Due to deep uncertainties associated with climate change and socioeconomic growth, managing bridge networks faces the challenge to perform optimization for different scenarios. There exist a large number of scenarios when various sources of uncertainties, such as population growth and the increasing magnitude and frequency of natural hazards due to...

The time-dependent deflection data collected by a structural health monitoring (SHM) system contains information indicating the damage accumulation of prestressed concrete bridges (PSCBs). However, for this information to be used, the results must be fully translated into reliable metrics. Model-based structural identification (SI) targeting the ti...

p>Main cables are the most important components of suspension bridges and require reliable corrosion protection because they are difficult to replace. In the past, corrosion protection has been performed mainly by coating the cables to block moisture. In 1989, after six years of service, inside of the main cable of the Innoshima Bridge was investig...

Fatigue cracking is a common problem facing steel bridges. S-N curves have been adopted in design specifications to offer guidance on fatigue design of these bridges. Structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques can provide reliable information on stress states at fatigue-prone details using strain sensors, thereby circumventing complex theoretica...

Tsunami-induced disasters present a significant threat to coastal communities. Under the effects of sea-level rise due to climate change, tsunami occurrence frequency and intensities would increase in a nonstationary manner due to the long-term progressive trend in the variability in sea level. Therefore, the reliability of coastal infrastructure s...

This paper aims to assess the seismic fragility of vehicle‐bridge‐interaction (VBI) systems considering the effects of vehicle types, traffic conditions, and road surface qualities. A stochastic nonlinear mechanical model for the earthquake‐VBI system is developed, and the fragility functions for the proposed VBI model are derived by considering th...

This Editorial introduces the themed issue on bridge and transport network resilience. The themed issue was a collection of papers and is split into three parts. The papers are grouped into three issues: (i) bridge and network resilience; (ii) monitoring of critical infrastructure in support of resilience modelling; and (iii) resilience by design f...

Risk assessment and mitigation programs have been carried out over the last decades in the attempt to reduce transportation infrastructure downtime and post-disaster recovery costs. Recently, the concept of resilience gained increasing importance in design, assessment, maintenance, and rehabilitation structures and infrastructure systems , particul...

In this paper, life-cycle probabilistic performance metrics of deteriorating reinforced concrete (RC) structural members are investigated using efficient numerical simulation strategies based on Importance Sampling. The variance reduction technique adopted herein allows to account for the time-variant modeling uncertainties typical of structural an...

Nowadays, the operational speed of trains is increasing significantly. In this paper, a train bridge stochastic system is built to assess the reliability of railway bridges for high-speed traffic. The track quality and system parameters are considered in the assessment by considering the acceleration response of the bridge deck. The uncertainties w...