Resilience of critical infrastructures: probabilistic case study of a district heating pipeline network in municipality of Latvia

The effects of disasters on communities is a critical issue to be considered in terms of growing exposure of infrastructures to natural hazards. The significant role of the infrastructure systems - and thus their interconnections - is a key for the current urbanization development expected to increase within the next years. Thus, the role of infrastructures should guarantee the support of urban life standards to guarantee public welfare. This aim can only be designed with an enhanced level of infrastructural resilience within the field of crisis management. The concept of infrastructure resilience is normally linked with the ability to cope with severe disruptions, guaranteeing a minimal level of a specific function of infrastructure itself. This framework provides a useful tool to enable stakeholders to effectively assess resilience strategies that are a key factor for building a resilient infrastructures. Considering this, the aim of this research is to present a resilience evaluation tool addressed to evaluate potential scenarios for enhancing the resilience of a specific infrastructure network and to further identify the most sensitivite assets of that critical infrastructure network. The case of a real system was examined by the application of probabilistic methods applied to infrastructure network to generate statistical data for the calculation of the district heating (DH) pipeline network resilience of a municipality in Latvia. The study clarifies how resilient the district heating system is to a specific hazard and what could be the effect of specific investment scenarios aimed to enhance resilience. It will also identifies the most resilient assets of the DH network system and thus determine the main features of a DH systems that are important to ensure overall infrastructure resilience. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.