Risk Assessment for Hazards in Infrastructures

Dear Colleagues,

The risk assessment of ageing infrastructures against their natural deterioration and potentially induced hazards is a challenging issue that has always concerned infrastructure developers and managers for ensuring the resilience and sustainability of affected assets, minimizing disruptions, and defending societies against physical, economic, and environmental consequences. Currently, the need to shield vulnerable infrastructures against hazards is increasingly urgent due to the rising frequency and severity of natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods) that impact their seamless operation and their existence.

Therefore, the risk-based inspection and monitoring of critical infrastructures seems imperative for maintaining asset integrity throughout their service life. Afterwards, risk-based performance estimation and risk-based structural and non-structural adaptation approaches focusing on assessing and modifying infrastructures to counteract natural deterioration are of paramount importance for ensuring long-term functionality. Moreover, developing comprehensive single-hazard or multi-hazard risk assessment tools for infrastructure resilience that consider systems' ability to withstand, recover from, and adapt to adverse conditions (e.g., climate change) is essential for both the proactive and reactive management of such incidents to ensure rapid action following hazardous events, thereby enhancing infrastructure robustness and minimizing economic losses.

In addition to addressing structural and operational aspects affected by natural decay and hazard occurrences, it is crucial to focus on infrastructure’s financial sustainability. Hence, probabilistic cost estimation techniques accounting for both direct project costs and indirect costs of economic and social consequences of infrastructure deterioration and failure should be analyzed to highlight the need for strategic investment to protect users, communities, and national economies.

The recent developments and the adoption of advanced information technologies (e.g., Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), computer vision (CV), big data, and geospatial and remote sensing technologies) are creating promising new avenues for initiating a new era of risk assessment in the infrastructure sector.

The investigation and integration of all the above aspects in current practices are essential for infrastructure systems to be fortified against evolving hazards, thereby supporting asset safety, economic growth, social well-being, and environmental sustainability concurrently.

This Special Issue on “Risk Assessment for Hazards in Infrastructures” welcomes submissions on a broad thematic range covering recent research work and applications of risk assessment of different types of infrastructure (transport, energy, water and sanitation, communication and digital, environmental and ecological, etc.).

Recommended topics of the risk assessment of infrastructures subject to natural decay and induced hazards include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Critical infrastructure vulnerabilities;
• Infrastructure resilience;
• Risk-based structural and non-structural adaptation strategies of infrastructures;
• Single-hazard and multi-hazard risk assessment;
• Risk-based inspection of infrastructures subject to natural ageing and hazards;
• Risk-based monitoring of infrastructures exposed to natural conditions and hazards;
• Risk mitigation for natural hazards and infrastructures;
• Response and recovery planning of infrastructure assets;
• Life-cycle cost estimation of infrastructures;
• Financial sustainability of infrastructures;
• Life-cycle risk assessment of infrastructures;
• Risk-based economic and social assessment of infrastructures;
• Advanced information technologies in the risk assessment of hazards and infrastructures.

Dr. Kleopatra Petroutsatou
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• infrastructure vulnerabilities
• resilience
• multi-hazard risk assessment
• response and recovery planning
• inspection and monitoring
• financial sustainability of infrastructures
• life-cycle cost estimation