Post-disaster restoration planning of interdependent infrastructure Systems: A framework to balance social and economic impacts

Abstract

Hazard-induced service interruption of interdependent infrastructure systems (IISs) (e.g., electricity, water, gas, etc.) can lead to significant disruptions of social and economic functions of a modern society. An effective post-event restoration of the IISs is therefore of paramount importance to the overall recovery of a hazard-stricken community as a whole. As opposed to approaches with pure engineering perspectives, this study proposes an IISs restoration planning methodology aimed at balancing tradeoffs between the loss of social services (e.g., health care, food supply, etc.) and that of economic productions (e.g., construction, manufacturing, trade, etc.) throughout the IISs restoration process. The methodology is distinguished from previous researches with the following contributions: i) quantitatively relates the losses of various social services and economic productions to the service disruptions of IISs through the functionality loss of buildings; ii) the IISs disruption-induced overall losses of social services and economic productions accumulated throughout the whole recovery process is set as the bi-objective in formulating IISs restoration plans, and the Pareto optimal solutions are given to satisfy different decision preferences; iii) physics-based models capturing operational mechanisms of the IISs are embedded to provide realistic estimations of commodity supplies at each time step of the restoration optimization. The optimization is coupled with Monte Carlo simulation to uncover the impact of decision preference on community recovery from a statistical point of view. Testbed illustration shows that the decision preference makes significant impact on the recovery of the community as a whole and of different areas in the community with different socioeconomic characteristics.