Asset Risk Management and Resilience for Flood Control, Hydropower, and Waterways

Abstract

Natural disasters in the past decade have encouraged agencies responsible for development and maintenance of infrastructure systems toward the accounting of risk and resilience in asset management, buying down risks to economic, environmental, and social objectives. A principal aim of continuous asset risk management is the resilience of large-scale systems. This paper adopts and describes metrics and models for asset management. This paper implements priorities for three diverse classes of assets—waterway navigation, hydropower, and flood control—and identifies key challenges for risk and resilience analytics, including data quality, variability across business lines in interpretations of risk buydown, assumptions of project synergies and interactions, and evolving agency missions and organizational structures. The scale of the demonstration is thousands of assets, US$4 billion of needs, and US$2.3 billion of available funds. Attributes representing the objectives to minimize consequential damages are elicited and alternatives ranked by their potential threat to these objectives. The various sources of model and data uncertainty are characterized, and appropriate treatments of uncertainties related to risk and resilience are recommended.