Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy

Transportation professionals increasingly must handle disruptions ranging from extreme weather to cascading failures across infrastructure systems. Educators across disciplines are tasked with equipping future professionals with the skills needed to build resilience, defined as the ability to anticipate, withstand, and adapt to these complex and sometimes cross-sectoral disruptions. This study explores how transportation resilience is taught across engineering, planning, and related programs based on a syllabus review followed by a targeted survey of educators. The results include trends in topics taught, teaching methods, assignment types, and perceived student response for transportation resilience educational offerings. The paper then presents a flexible four-part module that emphasizes systems thinking, infrastructure interdependence, collaboration across disciplines and sectors, and uncertainty management. This work highlights the status of transportation resilience education and contributes a teaching-and-learning resource to help prepare future transportation professionals to protect critical infrastructure in an uncertain future.

State departments of transportation are required to develop transportation asset-management plans (TAMPs). These data-driven plans are based on asset inventories, condition, and available resources and provide a plan for investing in and managing assets over 10 years. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) provide opportunities to develop and enhance these plans. However, selecting appropriate tools and developing verifiable, transparent applications is challenging. This paper presents a guide for state departments of transportation to understand the concepts and to use these tools to enhance their TAMPs. The paper aims to raise awareness of opportunities and potential issues and help asset managers develop the vocabulary needed to interact with AI experts. An overview of machine learning covers the different paradigms and tools. Building on the review of AI methods, the paper presents opportunities for using AI within the TAMP building blocks (asset inventory, condition assessment, deterioration modeling, and decision making), as well as two cross-cutting functions: data quality and integration and communication. The paper then presents how these building blocks are used to develop the required sections of the plan (gap analysis, life-cycle planning, risk analysis and risk management, financial plan, and investment strategies) and consistency determination. Example applications are included. Finally, implementation guidance is provided.

As stewards of the environment and taxpayer dollars, infrastructure agencies must consider the relationships and trade-offs among multiple objectives when seeking to advance societal goals. This paper highlights the co-benefits and trade-offs of two key objectives: building resilience and promoting sustainability. The paper analyzes the fundamental relationship between resilience and sustainability to determine the contexts in which their goals align in infrastructure system decision making. It then identifies specific practices that agencies can use to achieve additional benefits in sustainability while pursuing resilience goals, or vice versa. Based on a review and analysis of a broad selection of sustainability rating tools and vulnerability or risk assessment tools, this study identifies practices that serve both objectives. The findings indicate that co-benefits exist at every stage but decrease progressively in scale from the planning stage to the design stage to the maintenance stage. In general, adaptive planning practices that support flexibility, integration, alignment across scales, collaboration, and community engagement build general resilience while supporting sustainability. At the design stage, co-benefits are constrained by the applicable plans and typically apply only to specific resilience. By prioritizing resilience and sustainability as key goals at the planning stage, agencies can aim to achieve augmented effects in bolstering the general resilience of the system and the organization.

Engineering education has faced significant and deep-rooted challenges, including outdated curricula and pedagogical practices, limited access for underrepresented groups, and persistent diversity gaps, that collectively undermine its ability to equip future generations of engineers for a rapidly evolving world. The changes that are needed to reform engineering education are monumental and highlight not only the need for systemic transformation of educational structures but also a fundamental shift in the mindsets of those leading the change. Faculty, professional staff, and administrators must develop knowledge and skills that go beyond their disciplinary training to drive sustainable reform. This article presents a professional development curriculum that has, for over a decade, equipped academic change agents with the tools to implement lasting change. Drawing on experiences from teams supported by the National Science Foundation’s Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (NSF RED) program, the article highlights proven strategies that academic change agents can master and situates them within the broader literature on change in higher education. Specifically, we focus on how academic change agents can develop capacity for systems thinking, build their ability to communicate effectively with various community members, leverage strategic partnerships to increase impact, and cultivate a supportive community of practice with other change agents.

The status quo for infrastructure and community preparedness for climate disasters is not adequate for the intensifying climate-hazard landscape in many contexts, and this deficiency can be exacerbated by ineffective public involvement practices. Negotiated resilience is an emerging concept that acknowledges the evolving nature of resilience goals and the relationship between community engagement and climate-resilience outcomes. This study aims to enhance negotiated resilience outcomes for transportation agencies in the U.S. by codeveloping, with transportation practitioners, practical tools integrating disaster management capabilities (i.e., preparedness, rapidity, flexibility) with authentic public involvement practices. To achieve this objective, the study develops a capability maturity model (CMM) with indicators that transportation agencies may use to benchmark the effectiveness of negotiated resilience practices in achieving disaster preparedness in transportation systems. Additionally, this study develops a self-assessment tool that maps to the various capabilities in the CMM. Based on four rounds of targeted transportation expert interviews, the Negotiated Resilience Capability Maturity Model (NR-CMM) and tool are refined to reflect stakeholder feedback across multiple types of transportation agencies. The NR-CMM and self-assessment tool offer a practical method for state and local departments of transportation, metropolitan planning organizations, and other transportation agencies to assess their effectiveness across multiple areas affecting disruption absorption and community preparedness, including stakeholder involvement, internal and external education efforts, and disaster management.

Although definitions of resilience are wide-ranging, they ultimately aim to preserve functionality and performance during and after anticipated and unanticipated disruptions. Common themes for transportation system resilience include preparedness, robustness, response, and recovery. Adaptation is increasingly considered an important resilience ability for deeply uncertain conditions, and transformation an essential ability for sustainability. This paper discusses three factors that contribute to the development of resilience adaptively: (1) development of adaptive capabilities in an organization and its infrastructure systems to face known and unknown threats; (2) application of dynamic, adaptive, and robustness approaches in deeply uncertain conditions; and (3) mitigation of factors that cause or exacerbate unwanted disruptions to system function and performance—together with risk-based approaches to manage specific threats with well-understood likelihoods and consequences of occurrence. These factors enable an entity to adapt under deeply uncertain conditions—developing resilience as conditions change—and to adapt to curb the causes of disruptions. The benefits of developing resilience adaptively are to: enable the development of both threats-based and opportunities-based resilience; address deep uncertainties where it is impossible to quantify the chances and consequences of disruptions; and transition from merely managing symptoms to addressing the factors that cause, influence, or perpetuate them. These concepts are applied to develop an adaptive resilience improvement process for transportation agencies. This paper is potentially useful to practitioners interested in developing resilience adaptively and to researchers interested in risk-, adaptive and mitigation-based approaches to address known and unknown threats, for short- and long-term resilience gains.

To enable systems to adapt to changing future conditions, ensuring adaptive capacity in resilience planning is critical. This paper presents an approach to evaluate the long-term benefits of adaptive resilience in infrastructure systems under future uncertainty. The methodology uses long timeframe assessment methods based on NPV and approaches to quantifying different levels of uncertainty along with multi-criteria assessment methods. The approach is demonstrated using three case studies, where investments have focused on different aspects of adaptive resilience in various infrastructure systems. The results demonstrate the increasing benefits of adaptive strategies over time with ongoing learning and the evolving nature of resilience needs. The presented approach can be used by decision-makers in multiple infrastructure sectors. A flexible approach to evaluate the long-term benefits of building adaptive capacity to enhance resilience, this methodology can be a useful tool for practitioners and policymakers to present a business case for long-term adaptive resilience investments..

Capability Maturity Assessments have been proven to be effective tools in enhancing capabilities |

Incorporating adaptive resilience as a core value of transportation systems will equip transportation agencies to better address the increasing pace of future changes—both in climate and transportation system performance demands. Quantifiable measures are instrumental in incorporating adaptive resilience in agency organizational frameworks. This paper presents a dashboard tool that evaluates the maturity of adaptive resilience capabilities of a transportation agency, using an Adaptive Resilience (AR) Capability Maturity Model. A demonstrative example is presented to show the potential application of the dashboard tool and its implications for transportation system resilience planning. The example shows how the tool can facilitate identification of adaptive resilience capabilities that are at low maturity and thus may need prioritization for future resilience investments, and capabilities that are at a high maturity level and thus can be leveraged to enhance the lower-level capabilities. The AR performance dashboard tool may be used by transportation agencies to communicate their adaptive resilience efforts and maturity to stakeholders. It can also be used by practitioners to streamline and prioritize process improvements in adaptive resilience efforts.