Kumar, S (2023) Optimization of sustainability and resilience for transportation projects. PhD thesis, Colorado State University, USA.
Abstract
The state of America’s infrastructure is old and has been deteriorating and is in need for severe rehabilitation and maintenance. The population has been increasing which has increased the demand for new transportation projects over the last decade. Therefore, it is essential to not just construct new transportation projects but invest in the rehabilitation and maintenance of the existing infrastructure. The transportation sector has the highest greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions among all infrastructure projects. In the transportation sector, the roads and highways subsector have the highest associated emissions which calls for projects in this subsector to be more sustainable. Concurrently, it has been observed that the frequency of natural disasters has increased exponentially in the last few decades which has increased the need to be more resilient. Sustainability and resilience are intertwined but different concepts that need to be explored and analyzed together. Both sustainability and resilience have been quantified using a variety of different methods, and rating system have been one of the most common and widely used methods across the globe for infrastructure projects. In North America (especially the US), the ENVISION rating system created through join efforts of the Harvard graduate School of Design’s Zofnass Program of Sustainable Infrastructure and the Institute of Sustainable Infrastructure, has been the most widely used rating system for various infrastructure projects, especially transportation projects.Often, achieving sustainability and resilience is associated with a higher cost. This research proposed optimizing sustainability and resilience while minimizing the life cycle cost (LCC) and GHG emissions using the NSGA-II algorithm. It takes input of all possible strategies within the different dimensions of sustainability and resilience and uses the abovementioned algorithm to determine a list of pareto optimal solutions. These solutions represent a space of acceptable solutions which have high sustainability and resilience while also having low GHG emissions and LCC.This model is intended to assist stakeholder in making decisions to improve the sustainability and resilience while promoting a life cycle thinking. It also provides a unique database creation idea for keeping all sustainable and resilient strategies for different infrastructure projects in one place which can promote an open access feature as more transportation agencies and stakeholders buy-in to the idea of using this model.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor: | Mehany, M H and Grigg, N |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | optimization; population; sustainability; life cycle; rehabilitation; graduate; life cycle cost; highway; natural disaster; infrastructure project; stakeholder |
| Index terms: | greenhouse gas, program, population, life cycle cost, transportation project, strategy, natural disaster, dimension, infrastructure project, database, transportation agency, transportation sector, life cycle |
| Subjects: | value management, health monitoring assessment and metrics, management, software systems, data management, industry analysis, infrastructure and transport systems, climate science, research methods, demography, transportation engineering, environmental hazards |
| Topics: | Research Practice, Business Strategy, Digital Applications, Urban Studies, Sustainability, Engineering Principles, Project Management, Health and Safety |
| Descriptive scope: | 2 PC |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here