Model for Estimating the Impact of Interdependencies on System Recovery

Abstract

Infrastructure interdependencies have been widely recognized, especially in the postdisaster restoration process. It is essential to develop models to simulate interdependencies and quantify their impact on the functionality recovery of infrastructures. This study presents a generalized simulator to investigate the impact of different types of interdependency on functionality recovery. The proposed simulator considers that there are multiple possible modes to execute a restoration task by framing the restoration process of interconnected systems as a multimode resource-constrained project scheduling problem (MRCPSP). In addition, it considers three sets of uncertainties: restoration duration and resource demand to execute a task, as well as intersystem functionality dependency. By solving the MRCPSP with the objective of minimal restoration completion time, the optimal restoration schedules for different systems are calculated to predict functionality recovery. This simulator implements three types of interdependencies at both the component level and the system level: resource-sharing interdependency, restoration precedence dependency, and functionality dependency. Through a simple example, it is demonstrated how the proposed approach can quantitatively evaluate the impact on system recovery due to different types of interdependency. Research findings from this study can help to identify the interdependencies with the strongest impact and then develop preventive mitigation actions and effective plans of emergency response and disaster recovery for interconnected systems.