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Critical infrastructure represents important national assets for producing or distributing continuous flows of essential goods or services. When one aspect of the critical infrastructure shuts down due to an external disruption, other portions of the system that need those goods or services are likely to stop shortly thereafter, thus exacerbating the damage caused by the external disruption. Literature on critical infrastructure interdependency (CII) shows a need for analyzing failure records with time information from different types of critical infrastructure. This paper presents a knowledge discovery process for CII to extract records of frequent patterns of critical infrastructure failure that are directly or indirectly triggered by external disruptions. The knowledge discovery process, including integration of critical infrastructure failure records and their transformation into the data format needed by a data mining algorithm, is described. The paper includes a discussion on a disaster mitigation approach that could be used to stop CII-related failure events, and it includes the analysis of the results of sample critical infrastructure failure records. Disaster mitigation officials can employ the proposed approach to explore CII and to design countermeasures when a disaster hits. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-5487.0000059 CE Database subject headings: Infrastructure; Databases; Algorithms; Data analysis; Decision making; Security; Hazards. Author keywords: Infrastructure; Databases; Algorithms; Data analysis; Decision making; Security; Hazards.

The adjustment of utilities prior to highway construction is a particularly complex and challenging operation. One strategy that has been adopted in the last two decades is to incorporate utility adjustment work into highway construction contracts. In theory, this approach eliminates or reduces some of the complications and risks of utility adjustments. This paper aims to identify and analyze the decision drivers for selecting this strategy and help alleviate its implementation challenges. To this end, a comprehensive literature review and several interviews with experts from state departments of transportation and utility companies were conducted. Assessment surveys regarding the performance of recent projects that used the combined strategy were performed. Conclusions and recommendations for future research are presented. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)0733-9364(2009)135:9(812) CE Database subject headings: Utilities; Highway and roads; Decision making; Construction management; Contracts.