Community resilience-driven restoration model for interdependent infrastructure networks

Abstract

Critical interdependent infrastructure networks such as water distribution, natural gas pipeline, electricity power, communication and transportation systems provide the essential necessities for societies and their utilization is the backbone of everyday processes such as production, health, convenience and many more. Often cascading dysfunctionality or disruption in these critical infrastructure networks triggers chain reactions of blackouts or blockages through the system of highly interconnected infrastructure networks, and the disruption of surrounding societies. For the planning of restoration processes and resilience of these, social aspects and demographics should also be considered to assign and mitigate the possible social risks associated with these disruptions. In this work, we study the restoration planning of critical interdependent infrastructure networks after a possible disruptive event by mainly emphasizing on the vulnerability indices of interacting society. We integrate (i) a resilience-driven multi-objective mixed-integer programming formulation to schedule the restoration process of disrupted network components in each network with (ii) an index of social vulnerability that is geographically distributed. We present an illustrative example of the proposed integrated model that focuses on studying the community resilience in Shelby County, TN, United States.