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Highway Infrastructure Risk & Resilience Solutions

Designing and delivering highways that adapt, endure and recover

Highways Resilience Cover

Highway networks are under growing pressure from extreme weather, aging assets and rising demand, while digital systems introduce new layers of complexity and risk. Transportation agencies must strengthen resilience, protect critical infrastructure and maintain safe, reliable mobility — often while responding to disruptive events in real time. Preparing for the future requires integrated highway infrastructure solutions that strengthen physical infrastructure and enhance how systems are planned, monitored and restored as conditions change.

We work with highway agencies to assess risk, strengthen infrastructure and restore service quickly when disruptions occur. By combining proven engineering with advanced analytics and systems thinking, we deliver highway infrastructure solutions that anticipate evolving threats, improve asset performance and maintain safe, efficient transportation networks. This integrated approach supports faster recovery, better decision making and infrastructure that adapts to both physical and digital challenges. 

Predict and prepare

Incorporating future climate projections and modeling of hazards and understanding and representing asset inventories geospatially. A key part of this is assessing network impacts to target the most cost-effective investments, reducing risk and improving system resilience through focused, regionally specific highway infrastructure solutions offerings. 

Design to endure and resist

Integrating nature-based, operational and programmatic and engineered measures to protect assets and users under extreme conditions in both proactive and reactive environments. 

Recover fast

Plan emergency works and supply chains to safely re-open critical links in days rather than months in the event of catastrophic events.

How to build a resilient highway

  • Screen & Prioritize

    Step 1 – Screen & Prioritize

    Build an asset–threat inventory. Assess the likelihood and consequences of using advanced modeling. Identify corridor criticality and hot spots, then deliver a ranked, fundable program.

  • Analyze & Co-Design

    Step 2 – Analyze & Co-Design

    Run analyses of hydrology and hydraulics, channel migration, debris‑flow and wildfire. Test engineered and nature‑based interventions. Co‑develop concepts, costs and phasing.  

  • Deliver & Reopen

    Step 3 - Deliver & Reopen

    Use a Yellowstone‑style playbook for emergency works and stage reopening. Translate risk outputs into easily translatable, measurable risk‑reduction targets for decision makers. 

  • Monitor, Improve & Adapt

    Step 4 – Monitor, Improve & Adapt

    Establish dashboards for program performance. Refresh models after major events to keep designs current with evolving terrain and hazards. This includes using technology such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) in the design loop. 

Navigating highway risk and resilience 

Addressing common questions on hazard assessment, infrastructure performance and resilience planning across highway systems.

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A standard, data-driven method gives agencies one clear way to assess risk across projects. It enables a more efficient application of funding to where it delivers the greatest risk reduction. In long-term planning, it supports strong, defensible programs. After disasters, it can quickly use new data to re-rank risks, restore service and improve resilience.

A consistent, quantitative process to access risk. It evaluates how threats affect assets by scoring likelihood, vulnerability, and consequences. This approach is aligned to the NCHRP 23-09 framework, which is a research scoping study designed to help quantitatively assess risks and hazards. It also follows federal funding and reporting guidelines for highway assets.

Agencies can quickly add new LiDAR and event data, re‑run hazard models and re‑rank risks. This enables them to target the most critical assets and restore service faster and with greater resilience — as demonstrated after the 2022 Yellowstone flooding. 

Yes. The method integrates scoring with agency asset registers and GIS to create dashboards, identify hot spots and track program progress. The results then feed into planning, design and construction workflows, as demonstrated with ADOT.

We analyze and model wildfire probability and severity, post‑fire debris‑flow volume and run out and channel migration to design debris‑capable crossings and durable embankments, to name a few. 

We address climate resilience by designing safe, adaptable transportation networks that reduce emissions, support sustainable mobility and withstand climate impacts, while delivering assets that are efficient to build, operate and maintain over their full lifecycle. 

Our role in modernizing major urban corridors is to plan, design and deliver safe, resilient and sustainable highway infrastructure that improves mobility, integrates multimodal travel and adapts to growing demand and climate pressures. 

We integrate safety into our highway infrastructure solutions by embedding it across the full asset lifecycle—from planning and design through delivery and operations—using proven engineering, advanced technologies and data‑driven approaches to reduce risk, improve reliability and protect road users. 

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