A Decision Support System for the Resilience of Critical Transport Infrastructure to Extreme Weather Events

Resilience of critical transport infrastructure to extreme weather events, such as heavy rainfall, drought or icing, is one of the most demanding challenges for both government and society. Extreme weather is a phenomenon that causes threats to the well-functioning of the infrastructure. The impacts of various levels of extreme weather on the infrastructure varies throughout Europe. These impacts are witnessed through changes in seasons and extreme temperatures, humidity, extreme or prolonged precipitation or drought, extreme wind, and thunderstorms. The extreme weather events may result in disasters such as flooding, drought, ice formation or wild fires. These present a range of challenges to the operational resilience of critical transport infrastructure. The economic and societal relevance of the dependency and resilience of critical transport infrastructure is obvious: infrastructure malfunctions and outages can have far reaching consequences and impacts on economy and society. The cost of developing and maintaining critical transport infrastructure is high if they are expected to have a realistic functional and economic life (i.e. 50+ years). Hence, future extreme weather events have to be taken into account when considering protection measures, mitigation measures and adaption measures to reflect actual and predicted instances of critical transport infrastructure failures. The INTACT project, which is co-financed by the European Commission, addresses these challenges and brings together innovative and cutting edge knowledge and experience in Europe. It develops and demonstrates best practices in engineering, materials, construction, planning and designing protective measures as well as crisis response and recovery capabilities. All this will culminate in a decision support system that facilitates cross-disciplinary and cross-border data sharing and provides for a forum for evidence-based policy formulation.This paper provides some first results of the project and an outlook to the final result, the ‘INTACT Wiki’, a decision support system for the resilience of critical infrastructure to extreme weather events.