Resilience Modeling of Interdependent Traffic-Electric Power System Subject to Hurricanes

Abstract

Highly interconnected critical infrastructure systems (CISs) are the backbone of the well-being of the modern societies. It is crucial to account for the interdependencies among CISs in assessing the community resilience. This study presents a framework for resilience assessment of an interdependent traffic-electric power system subject to hurricanes. The traffic and electric power systems are both characterized using the flow-based mathematical representation, and three types of interdependency are captured. A modeling procedure coupled with the Monte Carlo simulation is presented to assess the resilience of both systems and to integrate different improvement strategies into corresponding stages of resilience. The traffic and electric power systems in Centerville, considering three improvement strategies, are studied to demonstrate the proposed framework. The results show that interdependencies can significantly affect the resilience of both systems, leading to different and the most effective strategies for each system. While hardening hurricane-vulnerable components and adopting a better repair schedule, both improve resilience of the electric power system significantly; adopting a better repair schedule works best for the resilience of the traffic system. The equal repair mode can achieve the resilience improvement in a balanced fashion. The results also highlight the importance of repair scheduling to the resilience improvement of these two interdependent systems when the available recovery resources are limited. Due to the interdependencies, the faster the functionality of traffic system can recover, the more efficiently the repair activities can be conducted, and thus, the greater resilience of both systems can be achieved.