On structural performance vs. societal economic growth

Authors

Kazuyoshi Nishijima and Michael H. Faber

Abstract

Optimization of investments into societal infrastructure has so far been approached with different perspectives from the field of economics and civil engineering. Whereas the field of economics approaches this problem by considering the aggregated performance of the infrastructure using the observed performance of infrastructure from the past (top-down approach), the civil engineering perspective takes basis in the performance of the individual structures focusing on the physical modeling of specific structures or classes of structures (bottom-up). At present, there is a significant gap between these two approaches. For the purpose of supporting improved efficiency in societal allocation of limited resources this gap should be bridged. In aiming for developing an appropriate methodical framework to address this problem, the present paper proposes a formulation on how to measure the capital stock of societal infrastructure and to control the deterioration rate in an economic sense, however, using attributes of structural performance which are common in structural engineering. The ideas on the basis of which the suggested formulation is developed concern mainly two aspects, namely: (1) how to define the societal requirements to infrastructure within the context of the reliability theory, and (2) how to differentiate the societal benefit between structures which are required to have the same function but have different functional reliabilities. Two principal studies are provided illustrating the relevance of the proposed methodical framework.

Published in/by

Proceedings ICASP10, 10th Intern. Conference on Applications of Statistics and Probability in Civil Engineering, Tokyo, Japan, 31.07- 03.08.2007.