Many studies and news in recent years have raised concerns and alarms about the detrimental impact of aging, fatigue, and deterioration processes on civil structures and infrastructure systems, particularly bridges and transportation networks, and warned about the substantial underinvestment in infrastructure repair and maintenance. This is becoming a major problem in most developed countries because huge stocks of bridges and infrastructure facilities are rapidly approaching the end of the service life. The scale of repair or replacement needs is remarkably large and represents a key obstacle to sustainable development of countries. This challenge is exacerbated by climate change effects, which may alter the system exposure to environmental hazards and increase the degradation rate. To face these problems, bridge engineering is undergoing a profound change towards a life-cycle-oriented approach and embracing a systemic vision at infrastructure scale. This paradigm shift is of key importance to consolidate and enhance criteria, methods and procedures to protect, maintain and improve the safety, durability, robustness, functionality, and disaster resilience of bridges and critical infrastructure systems. Risk-based management and prioritization frameworks are also necessary in this context to rationally allocate available resources and ensure optimal planning of bridge inspection, monitoring, and maintenance activities at infrastructure scale. The course presents general criteria, computationally oriented methods, experimental techniques, and implementation tools for life-cycle design, assessment, maintenance, and management of bridges and infrastructure networks, with emphasis on time-variant risk- and reliability-based system performance indicators such as redundancy, robustness, and resilience. A review of research advances and accomplishments, including results of recent research projects and case studies, is also presented to address the current status and future prospects in life-cycle of aging bridges and infrastructure networks in a changing climate.

Assignments include numerical applications to life-cycle assessment of bridges and bridge networks, with benchmark testing and applications. Grading is based on completeness and accuracy of the submitted assignments and final oral examination. The oral exam consists of open questions on the course topics and in-depth discussion of the assignment reports aimed at assessing the students’ knowledge and understanding of theory, implementation, and proper application of life-cycle oriented methods for reliability, robustness, resilience, and risk analysis.