The Role of Redundancy of Infrastructures on the Seismic Resilience (SR) of Sustainable Communities

Abstract

Infrastructures are fundamental links in sustainable communities, and they need to remain at a level of functionality during and after natural events. In particular, assessing the seismic resilience of infrastructures has become an interesting topic in earthquake engineering. The estimation of indirect losses due to seismic events is still a topic under discussion, especially for infrastructures. In this regard, the paper focused on including the level of redundancy inside an analytical formulation of the seismic resilience (SR). The main idea is to explore the possibility of alternative infrastructures that allow the circulation of services and people when the flow on the original infrastructure is interrupted or reduced. This goal is fundamental for preserving the resilience for sustainable communities. Therefore, the proposed formulation consists of considering the reduction in losses when the infrastructure is redundant by introducing the concept of the level of redundancy. In particular, indirect costs were herein defined with a new formulation that includes the level of redundancy inside the calculation of SR. The paper presented a case study that implements the formulation with the aim to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methodology. Several levels of infrastructural redundancy have been applied in the calculation of the SR of an infrastructure subjected to an ensemble of 100 seismic motions in order to scope the role of redundancy in improving the SR of the system.