Simulation Framework for Asset Management in Climate-change Adaptation of Transportation Infrastructure

Climate change will have a big impact on our infrastructure assets. Asset managers need decision support tools that can consider climate change impacts on these infrastructures. Infrastructures have very long life spans and climate change is also a long-term phenomenon. Climate change is also associated with a lot of uncertainty, making it more challenging for asset managers to make investment plans on these infrastructures. Unfortunately, existing tools for asset management are based on short-term operational and financial aspects of maintenance rather than strategic long-term assessments. These tools also treat infrastructure in silos, often ignoring the impact of other interconnected infrastructure on them. In this paper, we present a simulation framework that can help asset managers in assessing long term strategic plans for their assets along with the possibilities to include the uncertain behavior of climate impacts and the impact from other interconnected infrastructure. We use agent-based modelling approach to represent assets, asset owners and asset users as agents and study their interactions and the evolving behavior based on the decisions the agents make to maintain or to use the assets. This approach helps in understanding: the consequences of long-term strategic plans of asset managers and of user behavior, in identifying vulnerable areas in a transportation network, and in estimating the impact from other assets. In our case study on a transportation network, we observed an underestimation of damages from climate events when infrastructures were treated in silos. The framework has a potential to answer wide range of questions for asset managers in the context of climate change and its impact on interconnected infrastructure.