Case Study for Quantifying Flood Resilience of Interdependent Building–Roadway Infrastructure Systems

Abstract

Resilience is defined as the ability of a system to withstand and recover to a desired level of performance after the occurrence of a hazard. Community resilience has a significant socioeconomic implication for any disaster. Therefore, attempting to quantify resilience after a disaster is of utmost importance, particularly for planners, designers, and decision makers. Modern society depends on various infrastructure system networks to ensure functionality, and these infrastructure systems perform on their own and also perform interdependently with other infrastructure networks during natural hazards. For quantifying resilience, the interdependency between infrastructure systems plays a significant role; for instance, in the event of building damage, the state of damage to the roadways network is also crucial for the recovery process and ultimately in resilience. As a result, large-scale disruption of any infrastructure network increases significantly because of interdependency. In this work, an integrated geographic information system (GIS) and Bayesian belief network (BBN) framework is developed to study the resilience and effects in functionality due to interdependency among building and roadways infrastructure systems in a community. GIS is used for data collection, and BBN is adopted for computing the posterior probabilities of resilience. The framework is then implemented in a study area of Barak Valley in North-East India, and resilience is evaluated for the considered building-roadways network. Sensitivity analysis of system resilience to the critical components is performed to facilitate decision making under uncertainty. Finally, some general recommendations are given for improving flood resilience for future disasters.