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Rethinking infrastructure design from component failure to systemic resilience
Sam Dulin1,2, Stergios-Aristoteles Mitoulis3,4, Alexandre Bredikhin5
1Environmental Laboratory, US Army Engineer Research and Development Center, 696 Virginia Rd, Concord, MA, USA.
Nature Communications
|November 3, 2025
Summary
Infrastructure design must shift from risk-based to resilience-based approaches. A systems-based framework, considering cascading failures, is crucial for economic stability after major disruptions.
Area of Science:
- Civil Engineering
- Infrastructure Resilience
- Regional Economics
Background:
- Traditional bridge design prioritizes load-based risk criteria.
- Existing methods often neglect cascading effects on interconnected infrastructure and economies.
- The Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse highlights these limitations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To advocate for a systems-based infrastructure design approach.
- To quantify the economic impacts of cascading failures beyond direct infrastructure damage.
- To assess regional resilience using a case study.
Main Methods:
- Utilized the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse as a case study.
- Employed the regional economic model TranSight.
- Compared economic impacts of local transportation disruption versus combined bridge-and-port failures.
Main Results:
- Combined bridge and port disruptions significantly increase losses in GDP, employment, income, and labor force.
- Some economic indicators may not recover until 2040.
- The Baltimore region demonstrated limited resilience to compounding shocks.
Conclusions:
- Infrastructure design must evolve beyond component-focused risk assessment.
- A quantifiable resilience framework is necessary for interconnected systems.
- Systems-based design balancing risk reduction and recovery capacity is essential.
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