A Sustainable Performance-Based Methodology to Address the Impact of Climate Changes on the "State of Good Repair" of Transportation Infrastructure

This research focuses to address the effects of climate change on the transportation asset management. Climate change has resulted in increased storms, droughts, flooding, temperatures, and other climate to become more significantly frequent and powerful. As a result, climate change is now affecting the transportation assets around the world. This thesis is divided into six components: the literature review, development of the framework, development of the methodology, case study, discussion, and conclusions. The literature review will show threats, risks, and performance measures to monitor the climate change impact on transportation infrastructure. The literature review includes transportation asset like bridges, roads, culverts, rails, and the ports and waterways and will be followed by the development of the framework to incorporate risk assessment of infrastructure damage due to extreme climate events into Transportation Asset Management (TAM) practices. Within the framework there is a methodology to quantify the impact, level of risk, and recommendations to mitigate the impact of climate change. A case study follows and shows the applicability of the framework and risk assessment method for a bridge. This research helps identify assets at risk of failure due to extreme climatic events by calculating the occurrence, severity, and the risk priority number (RPN). The RPN is useful for prioritizing funding allocation in the asset management programs.