SUSTAINABILITY AND RESILIENCE IN THE REHABILITATION OF ROAD INFRASTRUCTURES AFTER AN EXTREME EVENT: AN INTEGRATED APPROACH

Abstract

For road infrastructures, the concepts of sustainability and resilience are becoming more and more relevant. The sustainability is closely linked with the concept of development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The resilience is usually connected with the occurrence of extreme events or unusual disturbances (earthquake, landslide, floods) during the life cycle of infrastructures and refers to their ability of recover the previous functionality. Usually, the two concepts that account for two desired qualities of the infrastructures are applied following separate approaches. Better choices in road design, maintenance and rehabilitation should lead to an improvement of both qualities. On the other hand, an in deep analysis of the sustainability and resilience demonstrates a significant number of similar characteristics. In the light of the above premises, in the present paper, the suitability of an integrated approach in the choice of the rehabilitation alternatives after an extreme event is evaluated. A method to assess the sustainability, based on life cycle costs, and to estimate the resilience is setup. It resulted that an integrated perspective can be pursued and both resilience and sustainability allow addressing an appropriate amount of technical, economic and environmental/social issues and can lead to identifying the most efficient solution of rehabilitation.