Predictive resilience of interdependent water and transportation infrastructures: A sociotechnical approach

Infrastructures are interdependent systems and their interdependency can influence their resilience to routine failures and extreme events. Even though infrastructure resilience has been widely explored, few studies have considered physical, spatial, and social dimensions simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a resilience assessment framework for interdependent water and transportation infrastructures. The framework incorporates the physical network of these infrastructures, social vulnerability indicators, and predictive analytics for a sociotechnical resilience assessment. It enables us to measure the impact of random failures due to aging in-frastructures, natural disasters, and their cascading failures. We applied the proposed framework to the City of Tampa, FL. The results indicated that areas with higher social vulnerability are more prone to cascading failures caused by both random breakdowns and natural disasters. While natural disasters affect all land use classes similarly, random failures have a greater impact on residential and institutional land use. The findings of this study highlight that infrastructure interdependency and the consequences of cascading failures should be taken into account in a coordinated infrastructure resilience assessment and planning. Further, socioeconomic factors and land use features should be incorporated in interdependent resilience assessment for a more comprehensive and equitable resilience planning.

Automated summary

Infrastructure resilience to routine failures and extreme events can be influenced by their interdependency and should consider physical, spatial, and social dimensions. This study proposes a framework for assessing the resilience of interdependent water and transportation infrastructures and applies it to the city of Tampa, FL. The findings highlight the vulnerability of socially vulnerable areas to cascading failures caused by random breakdowns and natural disasters, with random failures having a greater impact on residential and institutional land use.