Paolo Gardoni
Alfredo H. Ang Family Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Abstract: Civil structures and infrastructure provide vital services that support and enable societal functions. Therefore, ensuring their reliability and prompt recovery is critical for the public’s well-being and economic prosperity. However, the consequences of past disasters around the world have raised concerns about the vulnerability of civil structures and infrastructure and have highlighted the significance of risk mitigation and management. The maintenance, repair, or replacement of existing vulnerable, deficient, and deteriorating structures and infrastructure represents a significant investment. To wisely invest the limited funding, it is crucial to use advanced risk analysis tools in the decision-making process. This presentation discusses a general formulation for regional risk and resilience analysis. The presentation explains how to conduct a regional risk and resilience analysis considering multiple hazards and different infrastructure, as well as the effects of deterioration and interdependencies among infrastructure. The presentation also shows how the physical damage to structures and infrastructure can be cascaded to predict the likelihood and duration of business interruption. The presentation concludes with an example of regional risk and resilience analysis considering a hypothetical earthquake in the New Madrid seismic zone.
Bio: Paolo Gardoni is the Alfredo H. Ang Family Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Reliability Engineering and System Safety, and the founder and former Editor-in-Chief of the journal Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure. His research interests include probabilistic mechanics; reliability, risk and life cycle analysis; decision-making under uncertainty; performance assessment of deteriorating systems; modeling of natural hazards and societal impact; ethical, social and legal dimensions of risk; optimal strategies for natural hazard mitigation and disaster recovery; and engineering ethics. Prof. Gardoni is the 2021 recipient of the Alfredo Ang Award on Risk Analysis and Management of Civil Infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers for his contributions to risk, reliability, and resilience analysis, and his leadership in these fields
