Dr. Arnold Yuan

Arnold Yuan wants to change the way that civil engineers and municipal leaders view uncertainty. “Obviously, civil engineering is a very cautious discipline because it’s our endowed duty to protect the public safety,” he says. “But we also need to embrace uncertainty in our decision-making as an opportunity that can guide us.”

Yuan is a leader in the emerging field of infrastructure asset management. He works with municipalities to help them adopt a new approach to decisions about renewing, repairing and upgrading infrastructure such as water mains, bridges, pavement and sidewalks. To help municipal leaders see the full picture of an issue, he asks them three questions: What is the problem? What do we need to understand in order to solve it? How can we work together?

Ultimately, Yuan envisions a holistic approach to decision-making that accounts for the entire lifecycle of assets in a new way. “With a systems approach to asset management, we can not only look at the components of a system, but how people interact with it,” he says. “Then we can embrace uncertainty by taking into account both what we know and what we do not know.”