Modeling the interdependency between buildings and the electrical distribution system for seismic resilience assessment

Abstract

The complexity of large-scale power networks, together with their increasing ageing and obsolete design, implies an intrinsic fragility with respect to natural disasters, such as strong earthquakes. The investigation of the interdependencies among different critical infrastructures is fundamental to prevent possible cascading effects and frequent unserviceability. This paper aims at studying the effects of a seismic event on a large-scale virtual city, implicitly modeling the interdependency between the buildings and the electric distribution network. A consistent methodology to assess the resilience of the urban electric power distribution system is herein introduced and validated. Furthermore, a new resilience index is also introduced and compared to others available in the literature. The index is able to properly describe the network resilience, by taking into account aspects such as redundancy and resourcefulness. The developed methodology allows to investigate the impact of extreme events on the electric power distribution system also in case of scarce input data.