Our News

The data of our elicitation survey on restoration of flood damaged bridges is now available on-line in Data in Brief, please see here

The survey includes the duration and sequence of restoration tasks, idle times, cost, and traffic/functionality loss for specified damage levels of given bridge components. The use of this data is the generation of sets of restoration and reinstatements functions for quantifying the resilience of bridges exposed to hydraulic hazards, i.e. scour, debris accumulation and hydraulic forces, see here

In order to assess and quantify the resilience of flood-critical bridges and subsequently deploy bridge resilience models aiming at building resilience into transport networks, it is essential to use reliable fragility, capacity restoration and traffic reinstatement metrics and models. 
In our recent paper “Restoration models for quantifying flood resilience of bridges” published in Engineering Structures, recovery models are presented, including restoration task prioritisation and scheduling, inter-task dependencies, idle times, durations and cost ratios for different damage levels, as well as the evolution of traffic capacity after floods.

The paper is authored by Dr Stergios Aristoteles Mitoulis, Dr Sotirios Argyroudis, Dr Marianna Loli & Dr Boulent Imam and is available here.

Our group has participated in the IABMAS2020 conference, held online on April 11-18, 2021. We have successfully organised a special session on “Monitoring strategies for enhancing transport infrastructure resilience”

Please watch the video of a lecture that we delivered on “Data-driven resilience assessment for transport infrastructure exposed to multiple hazards”.

I’m speaking to help you Quantify the Resilience of Critical Infrastructure Assets and Networks. Would you like to attend?

1 – 3 pm UK time, Thursday 10 June 2021

more information and registration here

If you love bridges and want to protect them against floods then delve into the details of our recent article. With this paper you can assess the potential losses and risk of a bridge that is exposed to flood and scour effects. Use the fragility models of our latest paper with Dr Sotirios Argyroudis Vulnerability of bridges to individual and multiple hazards- floods and earthquakes published online in Reliability Engineering and System Safety (journal pre-proof available here

This is part of the results of the research project TRANSRISK funded by H2020 MSCA actions, aiming at the quantification of resilience of transport systems of assets exposed to multiple hazards. In this paper, we study systemically the vulnerability of different types of flood critical river-crossing bridges based on 3D numerical modelling, accounting for the uncertainties in scour hole geometry and location. Furthermore, we study the seismic fragility of scoured bridges. The fragility models provide practical means in resilience-based management by owners and operators of transport infrastructure. A paper on the restoration of flood critical bridges is coming soon!

Institution of Civil Engineers – Bridge Engineering

Recent natural disasters revealed the vulnerabilities of bridges and critical infrastructure to diverse hazards (e.g. floods, blasts, earthquakes), which may exacerbate due to climate change, leading to significant economic losses and societal disruption.  This themed issue is focused on the methods, tools and metrics used in the quantification of bridges and critical transport infrastructure resilience.

Examples of relevant topics include, but are not limited to: – Collapse assessment –  Retrofitting/strengthening – Robustness/redundancy – Risk analysis and resilience – Multihazard stressors infrastructuResilience – Network analysis – Restoration and reinstatement strategies – Network operability – Interdependencies – structural health monitoring and structural control – Numerical analysis and simulation – Resources and finance in restoration/resilience of transport infrastructure

Submit an abstract: https://lnkd.in/ezDJY8x

Damage of bridges and local transport network, by Dr Marianna Loli

On September 17, 2020, the Mediterranean Cyclone (a.k.a. Medicane) “Ianos” made landfall in central Greece affecting a great part of the Country. In the most impacted areas, the associated precipitation was among the highest ever recorded. Numerous slope failures (landslides, rockfalls, debris flows) and extensive flooding took place as a consequence of the event. Road and railway networks were severely damaged due to erosion of the supporting embankments and debris built-up. Riverbanks and levees were overtopped or washed away, while particularly pronounced was the damage to bridges due to foundation scour.

Dr Marianna Loli (Marie Curie Research Fellow of the University of Surrey) took part in a multi-institutional field reconnaissance mobilized by the US GEER Association and led by Prof Dimitrios Zekkos of UC Berkeley, and Georgios Zalachoris of Elxis Group. Multiple field deployments took place in a coordinated effort and were facilitated by UAV mapping, remote sensing tools, geospatial data analysis, optical and radar satellite imagery, as well as data-mining of social-media news.

Marianna’s work focused on the Town of Mouzaki (central Greece) which was the hot spot of flood-induced failures. She inspected a total of 15 bridges with damage ranging from minor (slight movement) to complete collapse. A preliminary analysis of her on ground observations is included in the 5^th Chapter of the Reconnaissance Report that was recently published by GEER.

This work is the first step of an ongoing investigation of scour effects on bridges that will be core to the verification of the risk assessment tools developed within the ReBounce project funded by H2020-MSCA-IF-Rebounce, hosted by University of Surrey. Selected case studies have been mapped in detail, employing UAV images, in collaboration with Elxis Group. Their detailed analysis will be presented in a Special Session that will take place in the forthcoming International Conference of Natural Hazards & Infrastructure (ICONHIC21).

Can monitoring enhance the
resilience of Civil infrastructure? A free workshop will be
deliverd on 8 January 2021 at 12 o’clok UK time.

Zoom link please join here:

https://surrey-ac.zoom.us/j/95984397747?from=addon

Field aspects of the PhD will be undertaken in collaboration with Kyambogo University in Uganda. We are seeking to recruit a PhD student at the University of Surrey. PI: Dr Kathy Pond, Co-PI: Dr Stergios Mitoulis.

The applications have to be made through this link via Reading University
https://research.reading.ac.uk/scenario/apply/
and the project is found here:
https://research.reading.ac.uk/scenario/projects-for-2021-entry/

The PhD project is associated with ongoing research activities being undertaken by the supervisors in East Africa as detailed in King et al., 2020. There is considerable scope for the student to exhibit excellence and originality in developing the details of the project and tailoring the field and desk work to answer novel research questions, which will have real-world impact in both the drinking water and health sector and engineering sector. Incorporating climate change scenarios will also provide an opportunity to explore future challenges to drinking-water infrastructure and the links with UN SDGs. We anticipate that the research from this PhD will be publishable in high impact journals.

a new paper on “Cost-based resilience assessment of bridges subjected to earthquakes” has been published in the International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, by Sotirios Argyroudis, Giorgos Nasiopoulos, Nikolaos Mantadakis and Stergios Mitoulis.

Transport infrastructure resilience is of paramount importance for societies, therefore its quantification is urgently needed. A resilience assessment framework based on well-informed resilience indices is presented and applied for assessing the resilience of representative bridges exposed to earthquakes.