Assessment of Seismic Risk and Importance Measures of Interdependent Networks using a Non Simulation-Based Method

Abstract

Infrastructure networks are critical backbones of urban society that support virtually every economic and societal activity. Recent events have shown that these systems are susceptible to natural and man-made hazards such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and terrorist attacks, and have the potential risk of creating cascading failures due to their interdependent nature. Therefore, analyzing the vulnerability of these complex interacting infrastructures under potential hazards is critical for the development of risk mitigation strategies and effective response and recovery. To assess the seismic risk on the infrastructure, non simulation-based methods have the merit of rapid risk assessment for infrastructures and the associated decision making, because they are efficient in estimating sensitivities and conditional probabilities which are often used for identifying critical components. This article presents a non simulation-based method to assess the system reliability of complex interdependent infrastructure networks under seismic hazards. Also proposed are methods to compute importance measures to gauge the relative contribution of components to system reliability. A case study is presented to demonstrate the proposed approach that can efficiently estimate the reliability of a network system, the effect of interactions between two networks, and the importance measures of components.