ASCE has honored Sankaran Mahadevan, Ph.D., F.EMI, M.ASCE, with the 2025 Alfredo Ang Award on Risk Analysis & Management of Civil Infrastructure for his outstanding research, educational, and service contributions to risk, reliability, and uncertainty analysis methods for structural systems, advancement of structural health monitoring techniques, and development of probabilistic digital twin techniques for risk and resilience management of civil infrastructure systems.
Mahadevan’s large body of work related to risk management of civil structures has focused on the modeling and monitoring of degradation of structural materials. His contributions in this area include corrosion, fatigue and fracture of metals and composites, and concrete degradation mechanisms such as chloride diffusion, sulfate attack, and alkali-silica reaction. His introduction of Bayesian methods for reliability-based inspection scheduling and risk management of corrosion and fatigue are prominently cited in the literature. His work on concrete degradation, extensively funded by DOE, has found applications in nuclear power plant structures and nuclear waste risk management. His work on these topics has been comprehensive, making advances in many directions.
He is one of the pioneers and earliest academic researchers in the development of digital twin technology for risk management, and continues to be a prominent leader in the new area. Beginning with his first paper in 2001 on the use of Bayesian networks for system reliability updating, he gradually progressed in the use of these networks to build probabilistic digital twins for the risk management of a variety of systems, such as concrete structures in nuclear power plants, coastal buildings, ship structures, aircraft and rotorcraft, and manufacturing processes.
Mahadevan’s recent work on the development of risk and reliability metrics for power grid operations, and day-to-day power grid risk management in balancing supply and demand, has become particularly impactful with the increasing proportion of renewable (but stochastic) energy sources like solar and wind in future power grids.
The Alfredo Ang Award on Risk Analysis and Management of Civil Infrastructure recognizes outstanding contributions to one or more people in the following fields of research: safety and reliability of engineering systems; life-cycle performance under uncertainty; durability and resilience of engineering systems; safety and performance under natural hazards, and related fields.
