Quantifying component importance for disaster resilience of communities with interdependent civil infrastructure systems

Communities and their supporting civil infrastructure systems can be viewed as an assembly of, often numerous, interacting components. Tools that can identify components relevant for community disaster resilience can help to efficiently allocate limited resources to reach community resilience goals. We use Sobol’ indices to measure the importance of vulnerability and recoverability of components for disaster resilience of communities with interdependent civil infrastructure systems. The initial component importance analysis requires no prior knowledge regarding component’s vulnerability and recoverability. We first rank components based on their importance, using their Sobol’ indices. Secondly, we illustrate how the results of the component importance analysis can be used to improve community disaster resilience. Finally, we use component importance to show how model complexity can be reduced by abstracting less important components.