Governance transitions in underground infrastructure: Coordinating resilience enhancement of ageing metro systems
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: As critical underground infrastructure, the resilience of ageing metro systems is fundamental to peoples’ safety and urban services. Its resilience failures extend far beyond technical origins; they arise from misaligned incentives, fragmented governance, and inefficient multi-stakeholder decision-making that derail technical implementation in complex urban settings. Here, we reconceptualize metro resilience as a socio-technical coordination problem rather than an exclusively technical one, developing a dynamic evolutionary game framework that reveals how service disruption constraints and stakeholder incentives determine whether cities escape low-resilience lock-in or achieve sustained adaptive capacity. We introduce a novel integration of life-cycle-informed, tripartite evolutionary game framework that integrates expert-based stakeholder salience identification with nonlinear dynamic modelling to capture long-term coordination in resilience enhancement decision-making. The results reveal that metro resilience is governed by sharp evolutionary tipping points: systems either remain trapped in low-resilience lock-in driven by short-term cost aversion or shift abruptly into stable high-resilience cooperation when institutional pressure, public supervision and risk reduction efficacy surpass critical thresholds. Beyond the ageing metro systems, this framework offers a transferable analytical lens for collaborative resilience decision-making in the comparable ageing urban underground infrastructures.
Institutions: Tongji University, University College London
Language: English
Subfield: Civil and Structural Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,820
Awards: G70893663, G7133403091
OpenAlex ID: W7221801955