Spatial Sustainability Assessment Framework For Civil Infrastructure Condition

Sustainability has become a prominent concept in technical, societal, and political discourse around the world and serves as a major guiding force for political actions and future societal development. Various methods have been proposed for sustainability assessment. However, only a few of them take into account all aspects of sustainability, as well as their inter-linkages and dynamic changes with time. Civil infrastructure, as the fundamental facilities and systems serving a country, city, or region, is critical to sustainable community development. Evaluating sustainability is thus key to ensuring that appropriate evaluations are integrated during the development of civil infrastructure. In order to facilitate these evaluations, it is valuable to build a framework to assess the sustainability of civil infrastructure and to provide information for the planning, design, investment and construction of new civil infrastructure systems and the rehabilitation, reuse or optimization of existing systems. In this paper, the authors proposed a spatial assessment framework for evaluating the sustainability of civil infrastructure. This framework provides a scientific based and comprehensive method to assess the sustainability of civil infrastructure at different spatial and temporal scales. It also provides multiple ways to present the sustainability assessment results clearly and effectively, so that it can assist decision-makers in determining which actions should be taken in an attempt to make civil infrastructure sustainable. The proposed framework is data-driven and can easily be used by researchers in other disciplines for other objectives.