Sustainability of school infrastructure and resilience of educational communities to natural hazards are of paramount importance to provide the safety and protection against various natural and man-made threats children face. The 2015 Nepal earthquake and its impact on schools confirms this approach at multiple levels, since schools are built as structures, supported as financial entities by the state, and function as social clusters within each community. In the literature, there are various guidelines and frameworks for safety and resilience of schools. Notable amongst these, the UNISDR's Comprehensive School Safety Framework consists of three pillars including safe school facilities, school disaster management and risk reduction education. A systems perspective requires a holistic approach to resilience of schools incorporating the safety of school buildings, governance and funding, provision of supporting infrastructure, school curriculum and more importantly, the resourcefulness of educational communities. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: first, to present a quantifiable, holistic framework for the resilience of schools, and second, to demonstrate how the framework is rooted in a systems thinking perspective. The novelty of the proposed framework lies in resilience assessment using a participatory, multi-disciplinary and holistic approach tailored to the salient features of a low-income country. This work is part of a Special Issue on Systems Perspectives: Clarity through Examples (see Dias 2023).

Building water-wise cities is a pressing need nowadays in both developed and developing countries. This is mainly due to the limitation of the available water resources and aging infrastructure to meet the needs of adapting to social and environmental changes and for urban liveability. This is the first book to provide comprehensive insights into theoretical, systematic, and engineering aspects of water-wise cities with a broad coverage of global issues. The book aims to (1) provide a theoretical framework of water-wise cities and associated sustainable water systems including key concepts and principles, (2) provide a brand-new thinking on the design and management of sustainable urban water systems of various scales towards a paradigm shift under the resource and environmental constraints, and (3) provide a technological perspective with successful case studies of technology selection, integration, and optimization on the “fit-for-purpose” basis.ISBN: 9781789060751 (paperback)ISBN: 9781789060768 (eBook)

Building water-wise cities is a pressing need nowadays in both developed and developing countries. This is mainly due to the limitation of the available water resources and aging infrastructure to meet the needs of adapting to social and environmental changes and for urban liveability. This is the first book to provide comprehensive insights into theoretical, systematic, and engineering aspects of water-wise cities with a broad coverage of global issues. The book aims to (1) provide a theoretical framework of water-wise cities and associated sustainable water systems including key concepts and principles, (2) provide a brand-new thinking on the design and management of sustainable urban water systems of various scales towards a paradigm shift under the resource and environmental constraints, and (3) provide a technological perspective with successful case studies of technology selection, integration, and optimization on the “fit-for-purpose” basis. ISBN: 9781789060751 (paperback) ISBN: 9781789060768 (eBook)

Infrastructure networks enable communities to be resilient by distributing essential services and supporting the relief and recovery actions necessary to bounce back from disruptive events. In order for infrastructures to play this central role, their own vulnerability needs to be assessed and managed. In this paper, a new distributional metric for vulnerability assessment is presented. Unlike existing methodologies, it aims at producing a characterisation of infrastructure vulnerability which accounts in full for the variability of the service delivery performance across disruption scenarios. The applications of the metric to theoretical configurations as well as real infrastructure networks are exemplified. These examples demonstrate that the proposed metric enables transparent and comprehensive information on the vulnerability of infrastructure networks. It is noted that the use of average values of system performance under different disruption scenarios may lead to unsafe conclusions about the system vulnerability. The proposed approach is also able to quantify the uncertainty in the vulnerability assessment of high-order scenarios. The paper also shows how the formalisation of the building blocks of vulnerability analysis made here, unifies many of the other methodologies found in the literature.

Modern infrastructure systems form complex networks that are organized hierarchically in communities of tightly integrated elements. This paper presents three new community-based metrics to identify the critical elements of a network system. Two of these metrics assess intracommunity and intercommunity behavior for any community structure, and the third metric accounts for the multiple levels of community structure. First, these metrics are studied to establish their characteristics with different community structures, and then the Great Britain Railway Network is used as a case study to demonstrate the usefulness of these new metrics. The results show that an assessment of the system using these metrics leads to the identification of not only those elements that are critical at the global level, but also those that greatly affect the local performance of the communities. Such identification of the critical components at the community and global levels would enable a better understanding of system behavior by stakeholders with competing demands. (c) 2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.

Current design practice in structural analysis is to assume the connection as pinned or rigid, however this cannot be relied upon for safety against collapse because during services the actual connection reacts differently where the connection has rotated in relevance. This situation may lead to different reactions and consequently affect design results and other frame responses. In precast concrete structures, connections play an important part in ensuring the safety of the whole structure. Thus, investigates on the actual connection behavior by construct the moment-rotation relationship is significant. Finite element (FE) method is chosen for modeling a 3-dimensional beam-column connection. The model is built in symmetry to reduce analysis time. Results demonstrate that precast billet connection is categorized as semi-rigid connection with S-ini of 23,138kNm/rad. This is definitely different from the assumption of pinned or rigid connection used in design practice. Validation were made by comparing with mathematical equation and small differences were achieved that led to the conclusion where precast billet connection using FE method is acceptable.

Current evaluations of the vulnerability of a road network tend to focus on the probability of damage and the change of traffic demand. The forecasting of low-probability but high-consequence events is a major difficulty. In this paper, a new theory, using a systems-thinking approach, for examining the vulnerability of the form of the network is presented. Our purpose is not to simulate traffic flow but to identify high-consequence scenarios that may arise from vulnerable weaknesses in the form of the network. Such scenarios are independent of models of traffic demand or the source of the damage and can subsequently be combined with specific demands to assess risk. A hierarchical model with clusters of road circuits formed at various levels of granularity of a road network is developed for use in a search process. Only free uncongested flow is considered. A search algorithm for finding vulnerable failure scenarios is described. A vulnerability index is proposed as a measure of the disproportionateness of the consequences of a series of events within a failure scenario in relation to the damage causing those events. The theory is illustrated with two examples.

The increasing complexity of infrastructure systems and the possibility of severe consequences due to interdependency and uncertain demands have led to an increased emphasis on resilience. Resilience, in simple terms, is the ability of a system to withstand adverse conditions and to recover quickly from these. Its interpretations and linkages to the related concepts of vulnerability and risk are examined. It is argued that vulnerability is an inherent characteristic of any system, hard or soft, and its identification and management is essential for improving the system's resilience. A systems approach to identify the vulnerable failure scenarios uses the concepts of form, connectivity and hierarchical modelling. Modelling of interactions with social systems and assessing their consequences requires dealing with uncertainty and it remains a challenge.

Most engineering infrastructure systems such as transportation, water, energy and communications are often described as `system of systems' where damage to a part of the system can have much wider consequences. A system which is vulnerable cannot be robust and resilience requires robustness. The purpose of this paper is present a framework for the assessment of vulnerability and resilience. This makes use of form of the network which combines the topology of the system and the capacity of the connecting links. The analysis leads to a set of vulnerable failure scenarios for which wider consequences can be examined. These are combined with the organisational processes to assess resilience of the system. The approach can be applied to many systems including lifelines. Here it is illustrated through a transport network.

The current generation of design standards in the construction sector has reached a high level of complexity, which reflects negatively on the quality of design standards and as a result on the efficient communication of technical provisions to users. Recently, the desire to improve quality and usability of design standards has become increasingly strong; in fact, enhancing the ‘ease of use’ will be a major focus in the development of the next generation of the Structural Eurocodes, scheduled to be completed by 2020. In this paper the authors outline the state-of-the-art of the concepts of quality and usability applied to design standards. A basic framework to start investigating these concepts is proposed and a real case study to explore the issue of quality in design standards is presented. This research shows that several challenges need to be overcome in pursuing the above goals and that further research is needed.

Managing risks to structures or infrastructure systems requires a thorough analysis of uncertainty. Structural reliability methods are suitable for dealing with parametric uncertainty, but many other aspects of system uncertainty remain unaddressed. These require an analysis of the form of the structural system as well as the structural response to hazards, such as material defects, loading conditions, and accidental damage. An approach to identify structural risks due to failure scenarios, which may remain hidden during a normal response analysis, has been developed. Such an analysis leads to identification of failure scenarios with high vulnerability. Different actions on a structure might contribute differently to a failure scenario; an interval probability theory can be used to combine the evidence associated with different actions. Structural risk is obtained as a function of probability of the identified failure scenarios and their consequences. The approach has been generalized to other infrastructure systems.

Infrastructure resilience is the ability of an infrastructure system to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions, which in turn requires a detailed understanding of vulnerability and risk. But while designing for foreseeable risks is a challenge, accounting for risks that are difficult or even impossible to foresee – such as those arising from complex interdependent processes – poses a far greater challenge. This paper argues that civil engineers need a way of addressing such low-chance but potentially high-impact risks if they are to deliver truly resilient infrastructure systems. They need to cultivate a wisdom to admit what they genuinely do not know, and to develop processes to manage emerging unforeseeable consequences. A generalised vulnerability theory that can be applied to any infrastructure system is described, together with an example of how it can be applied to an urban transport network.

Robustness is considered as an attribute of a structural system that relates to its ability to fulfil its function in the face of adverse events. It is difficult to quantify robustness. The focus of COST action TU0601 has been on developing a framework to quantify robustness and on identifying methods and strategies to improve the robustness of structures. The objectives of this paper are to present an analysis of different failures from the point of view of robustness and to identify measures that directly or indirectly contribute to robustness. It is concluded that structural form plays a major role but it is essential to ensure good management processes for design and construction.

A system is vulnerable if any small damage produces consequences which are disproportionately large. The damage may come from unknown sources. Consequently any inherent weaknesses in the form of the system need to be explored. In this paper, we present a systems approach to analyse the vulnerabilities of a system and hence to manage risks. The form of the system is organized into a hierarchical model that can be systematically examined for weak points. The approach can be applied to many networked systems including lifelines. Here it is briefly illustrated through a simple structural system and a road network.