System-Reliability-Based Disaster Resilience Analysis of Infrastructure Networks and Causality-Based Importance Measure

Abstract

Civil infrastructure systems become highly complex and thus get more vulnerable to disasters. The concept of disaster resilience, the overall capability of a system to manage risks posed by catastrophic events, is emerging to address the challenge. Recently, a system-reliability-based disaster resilience analysis framework was proposed for a holistic assessment of the components' reliability, the system's redundancy, and the society's ability to recover the system functionality. The proposed framework was applied to individual structures to produce diagrams visualizing the pairs of the reliability index (β) and the redundancy index (p) defined to quantify the likelihood of each initial disruption scenario and the corresponding system-level failure probability, respectively. This paper develops methods to apply the β-p analysis framework to infrastructure networks and demonstrates its capability to evaluate the disaster resilience of networks from a system reliability viewpoint. We also propose a new causality-based importance measure of network components based on the β-p analysis and a causal diagram model that can consider the causality mechanism of the system failure. Compared with importance measures in the literature, the proposed measure can evaluate a component's relative importance through a well-balanced consideration of network topology and reliability. The proposed measure is expected to provide helpful guidelines for making optimal decisions to secure the disaster resilience of infrastructure networks.