Quantitative flood risk analysis of road infrastructures (Publishable version)

Abstract

This thesis adopt existing methodologies for flood-risk assessment in other civil infrastructure (such as dams or urban flooding) and apply them in road type infrastructure in order to quantitatively assess flood vulnerability and risk in project locations where historical closure data is not available and the complex global network-approach usually implemented cannot be used for road risk management issues. By looking from a designer/ manager perspective, the aim is to deal directly with the specific road-segment under hydrological threat, shifting the interest to a more detailed comprehension of: the hazards likelihood of occurrence, the system (road pavement and bridges) response, the potential failure modes involved, and the expected consequences derived from a failure. Doing so, the proposed methodology has proven to be useful to support decision making and prioritization of risk reduction actions during and after the completion of the road design works in a case study considering climate change effect.