The responsive approach: an integrated socially-sustainable technically-optimal decision model

Motivation Over the past 30 years, within the field of infrastructure management, as infrastructure systems have grown more complex, the level of managerial and financial oversight has increased, and the computation power has become less expensive and more readily available, infrastructure managers have increasingly turned to computerized infrastructure management systems to aid in the management of the built infrastructure. An infrastructure management system acts as an infrastructure manager's 1) inspection database detailing the current state of the built infrastructure, 2) infrastructure performance simulation platform modeling the potential future infrastructure performance, 3) infrastructure deterioration and provided service estimator evaluating the equivalent financial loss associated with infrastructure deterioration and decreased provided levels of service, and 4) infrastructure maintenance action development engine formulating and scheduling technically and financially optimal infrastructure maintenance solutions. Historically, the performance simulation module of infrastructure management systems has focused primarily upon modeling gradual infrastructure deterioration processes, such as corrosion, and the infrastructure provided service estimator has employed nominal values for quantifying the public's evaluation of the provided infrastructure performance. These approaches have caused infrastructure managers to focus their attention and funding towards combating gradual infrastructure deterioration while giving priority maintenance status to infrastructure objects that place the largest nominally evaluated total performance impact on society. While this approach has helped infrastructure managers to more efficiently manage the built infrastructure, such an approach is only efficient if it is unfailingly implemented over multiple decades. Unfortunately, the current limited infrastructure management system scope has exposed infrastructure managers to two potentially disruptive forces – potential unforeseen natural hazard induced technical failures and potential political and/or financial funding support failures due to incongruent evaluation of the provided level of performance between the infrastructure manager's nominal evaluation measures and the experiencing society. While these two disruptive forces originate in two very different elements of an infrastructure management system, they both can induce the same result – undermining of the intended technically and financially optimal infrastructure management solution. Objective and originality To work towards rectifying both of these limitations, the current work has developed methodologies for both quantifying the long-term infrastructure natural hazard risk exposure and estimating an individual's experience-based evaluation of the provided level of infrastructure performance. The methodology for assessing natural hazard induced technical infrastructure failures has focused around de