A Novel Resilience Assessment Framework for Multi-component Critical Infrastructure

Critical infrastructures are vital in supporting the essential services of society. However, they are susceptible to damage when confronted with disruptive events like earthquakes. This fosters a pressing demand for research geared towards building a resilient critical infrastructure. To furnish crucial benchmarks for enhancing system resilience, we developed a framework for assessing the resilience of critical infrastructures, considering their intricate multi-component configurations. Our framework conceptualizes overall resilience as a synthesis of four principal attributes: resistant, absorption, adaptive, and recovery resilience. Aiming at quantifying these attributes, the temporal performance behavior of the system is modeled via Markov processes. On this basis, resilience measures are defined concerning attributes within the framework, each incorporating both inherent and acquired aspects. The calculation formulas for these measures are derived analytically based on aggregated stochastic processes. This investigation also proves that, within the proposed framework, series systems are no more resilient than parallel systems. A case study of a potable water system subject to earthquakes is showcased to exemplify the devised assessment framework and calculation method. Meanwhile, some managerial insights are provided to designers and managers responsible for critical infrastructures.