Resilience of critical infrastructure in Hong Kong – do structural engineers have a role to play?

Abstract

Functioning, resilient, safe, secure and sustainable infrastructure assets, systems and networks are essential to our modern society. Government departments and utility companies are facing unprecedented challenges of complexities and uncertainties managing and operating these assets and networks as they are becoming more interdependent highly vulnerable to man-made threats, natural hazards or climate change extremes. Despite that, existing infrastructure asset management systems deployed by individual facility owner and operator may not be incapable of addressing these challenges as the data being collected, kept and utilized has little consideration for cross-sector and cross lifecycle stages information sharing and utilization. This would results in poor planning and reactive actions when disasters or disruptions occur. Therefore, carefully planned critical resilience interdependent infrastructure systems and processes (CRISP) are particularly desirable for a city and/or country. In this seminar, the speaker will introduce his thoughts on the development of an integrated CRISP platform to facilitate various stakeholders capturing, synthesizing, processing, standardizing, storing, exchanging, sharing and analyzing the data from an internetwork infrastructure planning, operation and monitoring perspective. The discussions will cover some preliminary ideas on how emerging technologies can help realize the CRISP concept. It is hoping that the seminar will inspire the audiences so that they can play an proactive role developing a CRISP agenda for Hong Kong.