Surety applications in transportation

Abstract

Infrastructure surety can make a valuable contribution to the transportation engineering industry. The lessons learned at Sandia National Laboratories in developing surety principles and technologies for the nuclear weapons complex and the nuclear power industry hold direct applications to the safety, security, and reliability of the critical infrastructure. This presentation introduces the concepts of infrastructure surety, including identification of the normal, abnormal, and malevolent threats to the transportation infrastructure. National problems are identified and examples of failures and successes in response to environmental loads and other structural and systemic vulnerabilities are presented. The infrastructure surety principles developed at Sandia National Laboratories are described. Currently available technologies including (a) three-dimensional computer-assisted drawing packages interactively combined with virtual reality systems, (b) the complex calculational and computational modeling and code-coupling capabilities associated with the new generation of supercomputers, and (c) risk-management methodologies with application to solving the national problems associated with threats to the critical transportation infrastructure are discussed