Novel deterministic and probabilistic resilience assessment measures for engineering and infrastructure systems based on the economic impacts

Abstract

Engineering and infrastructure systems are commonly subjected to various types of destructive events that disrupt their functionalities and cause direct and indirect economic losses. The resilience assessment enables stakeholders and decision-makers to identify how a system copes with a disruptive event, how it adjusts to the new disrupted condition, and how it is capable of recovering its functionality swiftly and inexpensively. Although different indices have been proposed to quantify system resilience in recent years, developing a comprehensive and reliable index is an ongoing subject. By considering the importance of the economic aspects of engineering and infrastructure systems, the current research employs three variables of: functionality level, time, and cost, simultaneously, to define novel comprehensive, comparative, and comprehensible indices for resilience and its features. In this regard, the resilience curve of an engineering system is described in functionality-time-cost (FTC) coordinates, and deterministic indices are defined for absorptive capacity, adaptive capacity, recoverability, and resilience of a system. Additionally, the Bayesian Network approach is used to account for the inherent uncertainties in the resilience assessment process and to develop probabilistic indices for the mentioned features. Finally, a case study is presented to demonstrate how ignoring the economic impacts of disruptive events might be misleading when evaluating resilience.