Trade-off between short-term resilience and long-term sustainability in infrastructure systems

Resilience and sustainability are widely recognized as desirable properties of infrastructure systems.  Although related, they can become conflicting objectives, especially when resources available to enhance them are limited, making trade-offs between short-term resilience and long-term sustainability inevitable. Despite growing needs of increasing both resilience and sustainability, systematic analyses of such trade-offs remain limited.  In this work, we address this gap by developing a stylized, minimalistic stochastic model of system functionality under a sequence of disruptions.  The results reveal the nature of the trade-offs between short-term resilience and long-term sustainability and show that, depending on the effectiveness of investments in each, sub-optimal allocations may arise and should be avoided.  The analysis establishes clear relationships demonstrating how physical system features and investment strategies interplay to influence the nature of such resilience-sustainability trade-offs.