Abstract
Transportation infrastructure resilience is of paramount importance for societies and economies, therefore its quantification is urgently needed. Infrastructure assets and networks should be robust, i.e. they should have the ability to absorb the actions of natural hazards with minimal loss of functionality and thus should be designed to have redundancy for providing alternatives for damaged components. In addition, resilience enhancement requires the availability of resources and prioritization of goals, for rapid restoration of the affected assets functionality at an acceptable level. Hence, owners and operators would be benefited in the decision-making process from quantifications of resilience that account for different seismic events, the type and extent of expected damage, and the time of restoration. This paper is an application that takes into account the abovementioned factors in the resilience assessment of representative bridges in Thessaloniki, Greece, exposed to earthquakes. In particular, this application quantifies the robustness of bridges against different seismic hazard scenarios, by utilizing realistic fragility curves and the rapidity of the recovery and/or retrofitting after the occurrence of a certain degree of damage, based on realistic restoration functions. Two different approaches for the modelling of the restoration tasks are examined. Resilience assessment is based on a well-informed resilience index, which is a function of the time-variant functionality of the infrastructure over the restoration time for these scenarios. The results of this research are expected to facilitate owners to enhance decision-making and risk management toward more resilient infrastructure.