Building Resilience: A Unified Approach to Civil Structures and Infrastructure Systems

Dr. Cao Wang

Abstract
The functionality of modern communities is largely supported by civil structures and physical infrastructure systems. These systems are expected to provide consistent service throughout their intended lifespans. However, both natural and man-made hazards, along with harsh service environments, introduce risks of damage or failure. Moreover, many natural hazards exhibit time-varying trends in frequency and/or magnitude, potentially influenced by climate change.

In this context, reliability and resilience are two valuable measures for assessing an object’s—such as an individual structure or a system of interacting structures—capacity to endure environmental and operational stresses in a changing world.

This talk focuses on the reliability and resilience of structures and infrastructure systems. Specifically, we will explore the definitions and general analytical methods associated with these two measures. We consider resilience as a function of an object’s performance over time and argue that, from a mathematical standpoint, it can be viewed as a generalized form of reliability. This perspective allows us to unify reliability and resilience within a single analytical framework.

Dr. Cao Wang, is an ARC DECRA Fellow in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). He received his PhD from the University of Sydney in 2019. His research interests include the risk, reliability, and resilience of civil structures and infrastructure systems.

Dr. Wang serves as an Associate Editor for three international journals: ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part A: Civil Engineering; ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part B: Mechanical Engineering; and Engineering Reports. He is also a member of the editorial boards of several other journals.

He is the author of two books: Structural Reliability and Time-Dependent Reliability (Springer, 2021) and Civil Structures and Infrastructure Systems: From Reliability to Resilience (Elsevier, 2025). Dr. Wang is a member of the Committee on Probability and Statistics in the Physical Sciences (C(PS)²) of the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability (2021–2025).