Natural Hazards Research Summit 2022: A Coupled Geomechanics-Reliability Framework to Evaluate Closure and Damage Risk for Highway Assets Subject to Geohazard Impacts

Natural hazards are arguably the main threat to infrastructure in many countries. Transportation infrastructure (like roads and railroads) is particularly vulnerable to geohazards such as landslides and earth mass movements. The closure or damage of transportation infrastructure can have dire consequences, not only from an economic standpoint but also from a community resilience perspective, as it may isolate populations already distressed by a natural hazard, and make aid efforts costlier and challenging. To address this problem, we propose a new framework to analyze transportation infrastructure subject to geohazard impacts. The framework combines 3D physical modeling at large scale with reliability analysis to quantify probabilities of earthen slope failure, threshold values for failure triggers, and the reach and impact of the destabilized earthen mass on the infrastructure. We showcase the capabilities of our framework with a hypothetical highway model and demonstrate that the framework is capable of providing quantitative assessment of risk for road closure and damage. This framework can be further developed into a key modeling tool to help plan, design, and operate transportation infrastructure that is reliable and resilient from economic, sustainability, and societal standpoints.