Title: Modelling the recovery of critical commercial services and their interdependencies on civil infrastructures

Authors: Ni Ni; Richard G. Little; Thomas C. Sharkey; William Wallace

Addresses: Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA ' Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA ' Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA ' Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA

Abstract: When an extreme event occurs in a specific area, the mere recovery of civil infrastructures is not enough to help recover local communities due to the cascading disruptions that can occur to supply chains of critical commercial services, whose operation and restoration is highly dependent on infrastructures. We build single-period, multi-commodity disruption models to examine the interdependencies between infrastructures and critical commercial services and predict the outages experienced by local communities after extreme events. We further build multi-period restoration models to select and schedule the restoration tasks after disruptive events with an objective to maximise the aggregated flows of utilities and commodities. We simulate scenarios of Categories 2, 3, 4 hurricanes and apply the models to a dataset of an artificial county with a population of half a million. We find that coordinated infrastructure restoration decisions with critical commercial services help improve community resilience, especially under relatively severe extreme events.

Keywords: infrastructure restoration; interdependencies; critical commercial services; community resilience; cascading failures; supply chain disruption.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCIS.2019.103023

International Journal of Critical Infrastructures, 2019 Vol.15 No.4, pp.355 - 382

Received: 28 Jun 2018
Accepted: 31 Jan 2019
Published online: 14 Oct 2019 *

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