Evaluating Contributions of Emerging Technologies to Civil Infrastructure System Resilience. II: Case Studies

Abstract

Many emerging technologies are gaining attention in the civil engineering industry that claim to be able to aid in how civil infrastructure is constructed, monitored, or operated. At the same time, building and managing civil infrastructure with resilience has become popular with researchers and practitioners in the face of disrupting events. This paper follows Part I of this two-part set of papers. Part I proposes a qualitative workflow for evaluating emerging technologies and recognizing their specific contributions to civil infrastructure system resilience. In this work, we start with a graph-theoretic analysis to analyze the capacity of the proposed workflow as a logic graph. A collection of case studies is then presented across varying technological types to test this workflow and raise the visibility of several leading emerging technologies in the civil engineering industry. Each case study presents (1) an emerging technology, (2) an infrastructure application, (3) a disruption that the infrastructure may face, and (4) an evaluation of how that technology would contribute to resilience. The results of the case studies are examined, and the development of emerging technologies and their suitability for civil infrastructure systems are discussed.