Improving repair sequence scheduling methods for postdisaster critical infrastructure systems

Abstract

AbstractThe recovery process of postdisaster critical infrastructure systems (CISs) includes multiple phases, among which the repair phase usually takes the longest time and contributes the largest to system recovery rapidity and system resilience. This article formulates the repair sequence scheduling problem for damaged CIS components under limited repair resources in a general form, and then proposes two novel heuristic methods to enhance its solution performance. To demonstrate the efficiencies of the two proposed methods, typical existing methods are also briefly introduced for comparison purposes, including three component importance‐based methods (CIBMs), a genetic algorithm‐based method (GABM), a time index‐based heuristic method (TIBHM), and a component index‐based exact solution method (CIBESM). Those methods are separately applied into thousands of damage scenarios for three systems, and are then compared in terms of the optimality gap and the computational cost. Results show that the two proposed methods have significantly better performance than existing methods, whereas the first proposed method can be adapted for critical time points‐based resilience assessment and optimization, and the second proposed method can be applied to the recovery of large‐scale CISs with extensive disruptions.