Many regions in the world are experiencing rapid growth that is symbolized by massive development and construction of civil infrastructures. Unfortunately, these civil infrastructures do, and will, deteriorate with time. It is now generally recognized that the expenditure for an infrastructure goes well beyond its completion. In fact, more and more statistics show that the design and construction costs only constitute a small portion of the total expenditure that society has to pay during the life-span of the infrastructure. Indeed, the cost to operate and maintain an infrastructure is often higher than its design and construction cost. To better utilize financial resources, it is necessary to consider this issue from a whole life-cycle viewpoint. Also, by using proper life-cycle management and service life prediction techniques, the infrastructure performance could be improved and premature deteriorations could be avoided, thus leading to optimum operation and maintenance of infrastructures.
The International Workshop on Integrated Life-Cycle Management of Infrastructures was held from 9 – 11 December 2004 in Hong Kong. The Workshop was co-organized by the Department of Civil Engineering and the Smart and Sustainable Infrastructure Research Center of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. It was jointly sponsored by the KC Wong Education Foundation, the United States National Science Foundation, the Structural Division and the Material Division of the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers. Six invited keynote papers and forty technical papers were presented by leading researchers from Hong Kong, China, United States and other parts of the world. These papers were categorized into four areas: (1) materials, design and construction; (2) assessment and evaluation; (3) environmental, social and economic consideration; and (4) management and maintenance. The contributions summarized current advancements and also provided future possible developments of life-cycle management of infrastructures.
A selection of seven of these papers is published in this special issue. The authors of these selected papers were asked to provide extended versions of their workshop papers, which were then subjected to the regular peer-review process. A method to evaluate highway capacity investments that is consistent with the sustainable development perspective is presented by List. The approach combines economic concepts with a representation of the facility's lifetime use for a robust analysis. Wang et al. present a newly designed integrated wireless monitoring system that supports real-time data acquisition from multiple wireless sensing units. The system is capable of simultaneous data collection, data interrogation and wireless transmission. A pedagogical model that spans the life-cycle of sanitation infrastructure with chronic inaccessibility to water and sanitation services is proposed by Louis and Magpili. The pedagogy consists of community capacity assessment, service technology systems evaluation, and sequential allocation of capital investments to expand the capacity for water supply, wastewater and sewage treatment, and solid waste management infrastructure in affected communities. Xu et al. introduce a stochastic optimization model to help decisionmakers understand the risk-return tradeoff in regional earthquake risk mitigation, and to help state and local governments comply with the requirements of the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000. Garvin performs a retrospective analysis demonstrating how systems thinking and delivery innovation could have changed a mega-project's financial situation and system configuration. Zhang and Zhou investigate the applicability of the current bridge health monitoring technology for abnormality alarming. They show how the static deformation, the stress distribution, and the dynamic characteristics of a bridge can be affected by damage. Finally, a structural health system design for long-span bridges is proposed by Wong. He summarizes six integrated modules for the system: sensory, data acquisition and transmission, data processing and control, structural health evaluation, structural health data management, and inspection and maintenance.
This special issue was initiated by Professor Dan M. Frangopol, the Editor-in-Chief of Structure and Infrastructure Engineering, to whom I wish to express my sincere gratitude. I also thank all the authors for their careful preparation of the manuscripts, all the reviewers for their in-depth suggestions and recommendations, and Professor Moe S. Cheung, the Chairman of the Workshop, for his support and encouragement.