Assessing flood risks on road infrastructures is critical for the definition of mitigation strategies and adaptation processes. Some efforts have been made to conduct a regional flood risk assessment to support the decision-making process of exposed areas. However, these approaches focus on the physical damage of civil infrastructures without considering indirect impacts resulting from social aspects or traffic delays due to the functionality loss of transportation infrastructures. Moreover, existing methodologies do not include a proper assessment of the uncertainties involved in the risk quantification. This work aims to provide a consistent quantitative flood risk estimation and influence factor modelling for road infrastructures. To this end, a Flood Risk Factor (FRF) is computed as a function of hazard, vulnerability, and infrastructure importance factors. A Bayesian Network (BN) is constructed for considering the interdependencies among the selected input factors, as well as accounting for the uncertainties involved in the modelling process. The proposed approach allows weighting the relevant factors differently to compute the FRF and improves the understanding of the causal relations between them. The suggested method is applied to a case study located in the region of Santarem Portugal, allowing the identification of the sub-basins where the road network has the highest risks and illustrating the potential of Bayesian inference techniques for updating the model when new information becomes available.

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Structural reliability has become a widely accepted performance indicator for infrastructures over the past decade, providing valuable information about their structural condition. As a result, it has been assessed in combination with deterioration prediction, aiming at defining optimal maintenance, and rehabilitation strategies for bridge networks. In that case, reliability values need to be updated based on collected data. To this purpose, there has been a rapid development of advanced bridge condition assessment techniques, both in the fields of structural health monitoring as well as on non-destructive assessment techniques. Most of the sophisticated non-destructive methods are the preferred option but sometimes are not possible. Thus, visual inspection is still the predominant bridge condition assessment technique being adopted within the majority of Bridge Management Systems (BMS). However, there is a procedural gap when incorporating information obtained from visual inspections into a reliability assessment. Therefore, this paper describes a methodology for a timedependent reliability-based condition evaluation of existing bridges. The procedure is applied to a pre-stressed reinforced concrete railway bridge located in Portugal, in which prediction of reliability levels are calculated for different periods assuming corrosion initiation, causing a reduction in the cross-section area of the steel reinforcement and residual strength reduction, based on onsite inspection evidence. Finally, the updating is made through a Bayesian approach to compute the posterior bridge reliability based on inspection results. This approach may apply to other types of structures considering information obtained from visual inspection concerning the actual deterioration state in a quantitative way.

Road infrastructures are one of the most important assets in the world due to the dependency on other critical infrastructures upon it. Society expects an uninterrupted availability of the road network, nevertheless it has become a difficult task as, in the last decades, climate change has significantly affected transport networks, especially due to the occurrence of extreme natural events leading to the disruption of the network. Those events include floods, wild fires, landslides and others, and all of them may increase both in frequency and intensity in the coming century. Therefore, there is a clear need for timely adaptation. Regarding those adaptability measures, an important step is needed to quantify how the transport network is directly and indirectly affected by extreme weather events, which can be obtained within a risk assessment. Nonetheless, there are many questions and variability about this topic such as uncertainties in projections of future climate, effects assessment, and how it can be an integration of all these aspects into the decision-making process. In that scope, this work describes a risk assessment methodology having account the cause, effect, and consequence of extreme events in road networks to identify the major risks and therefore the assets that may be suitable to be analyzed within a selection of adaptation measures aiming at a holistic decision-making support tool.