Evaluating the Resilience of Interdependent Infrastructure Systems with a Focus on Community Livability

Abstract

Infrastructure systems play a critical role in creating a livable environment for human societies. Hence, enhancing the resilience of infrastructure systems against the adverse impacts of disasters has become a prominent research area in different engineering disciplines. A pivotal step toward this goal is to address the amplifying impact of infrastructure interdependencies in evaluating the performance of the infrastructure systems. However, evaluating the performance of interdependent infrastructure systems (IIS) is associated with several technical challenges, including heterogeneity of the assets involved and incorporating their end-user perspective. This paper aims to determine the severity of the errors that could be made by ignoring the interdependency between different infrastructure systems. The paper also aims to introduce community livability as an inclusive and universal measure of resilience for interdependent infrastructure, which (1) covers all different types of infrastructure (heterogeneity); and (2) is based on the end-user experience. The applicability of the proposed measure (community livability) is tested using two case studies by measuring the earthquake resilience of healthcare–transportation IIS and power–water IIS. The results confirm the importance of incorporating interdependencies between their different elements and end-user experience while measuring the resilience of IISs is illustrated. The results also confirm the proposed methodology’s applicability for assessing different infrastructure systems with different characteristics.