Abstract
Infrastructure systems underpin our modern communities, providing a platform for social and economic growth. Increasing urbanisation coupled with an increasing population means that these systems are continually expanding, becoming increasingly complex and interconnected. Therefore, a single infrastructure system now relies on other systems to maintain normal functionality. Whilst analysis methods exist to determine the impact of failures in single infrastructure systems, methods to analyse the impact of interdependence of infrastructure systems can be found lacking. Percolation theory is often used to assess failures in one system due to an initial failure in another connected systems. However, whilst this method has many mathematical applications, we show that it can give erroneous results when applied to model failure in infrastructure systems. In this paper, we propose a new method for the analysis of interdependent infrastructure systems which also accounts for their hierarchical structure.
Highlights
Infrastructure has been defined in many different terms; its societal role [29], its role underpinning economic well-being [23] and its capital intensity and public nature [39]
We provide a brief overview of the modelling methodologies available to infrastructure providers to model the failures in their system due to a third party failure, showing that the commonly used percolation theory approach is potentially deficient for modelling cascading failures within infrastructure systems and develop a new approach to model interdependent cascading failures
If percolation theory is applied to the analysis of interdependent infrastructure systems, which include asource” node(s), large errors may be present in the results which could lead to incorrect assumptions regarding the resilience, or failure risk, of two interconnected infrastructure systems
Summary
Infrastructure has been defined in many different terms; its societal role [29], its role underpinning economic well-being [23] and its capital intensity and public (or quasi-public) nature [39]. The public switched telephone network failed and the batteries sustaining the mobile telephone transmitters were depleted, hampering communications and causing pump failures as telemetry signals were lost [24, 28] In this event, the water and wastewater networks performed well given the severity; only four of the water facility failures caused a loss of supply to customers [24, 28]. The water and wastewater networks performed well given the severity; only four of the water facility failures caused a loss of supply to customers [24, 28] Notwithstanding, this event and subsequent events in Gloucestershire and Yorkshire [7] raised concerns by infrastructure owners and operators within the UK regarding their ability to assess, anticipate and avoid these risks. We do not consider the probability component of risk, but focus on the criticality and impact elements
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