Adapting HLA-based co-simulation for interdependent infrastructure resilience management

Abstract

Since infrastructure systems are threatened by natural or man-made hazards with unprecedented frequency and intensity, decision-makers spare no efforts in proposing methods and tools to improve the resilience of interdependent infrastructures. However, these approaches and toolkits are flawed in characterizing the heterogeneous operating regimes of different infrastructure systems. Moreover, worst-case scenario is commonly harnessed when generating the hazard information maps and assessing the induced adverse consequences on infrastructures, which is exaggerated as all the identified vulnerable spots in infrastructures rarely suffer from the worst situation simultaneously. Besides, resilience assessment methods are mostly static and not competent in capturing the emergence and development of specified hazard event and revealing the dynamic resilience behavior of interdependent infrastructure systems. To address these gaps, this paper proposes an overarching High Level Architecture (HLA)-based co-simulation framework which is composed of the HLA-based service adaptation supported by the Run Time Infrastructure (RTI) libraries, simulators and interface design between the federates, and typical scenarios to facilitate interdependent infrastructure resilience management. It further adapts and orchestrates the generic HLA-based co-simulation framework to suit the interdependent infrastructure resilience management scenarios, while accommodating the physics-based domain-specific simulators; supports seamless and interoperable message exchange between interdependent infrastructures along with the development of specific hazards; and provides interface design between the infrastructure-specific simulators and the RTI. A typical flooding case is adopted to demonstrate the validity and transferability of our proposed framework. The overarching HLA-based co-simulation framework aims to formalize a modeling paradigm to investigate the time-varying resilience behavior of interdependent infrastructure systems, in order to contribute to the collaborative and joint decision making efforts between stakeholders of infrastructure regulatory agencies.