Risk assessment models to investigate the impact of emergency on a water supply system

Abstract

Abstract A water supply system is a critical infrastructure to support industrial and agricultural production and human life. It often operates abnormally in an emergent risk situation, resulting in shortage or suspension of water supply, even health risk and economic losses. In order to reduce negative impacts posed by these potential threats, identifying and evaluating possible risks in a water supply system has been becoming more necessary. For this reason, we establish two risk assessment models in accordance with two different situations based on uncertainty theory in the presence of insufficient historical data. In the proposed models, we first discuss emergency in three respects: the possibility of emergency occurrence, the consequence caused by emergency and system vulnerability. Then the risk to a water supply system is defined by the uncertain measure of loss-positive by incorporating a risk tolerance index and loss function contributed by the above analysis. Moreover, several theorems for calculating the risk index of series and parallel water supply systems are presented. Finally, we illustrate the feasibility and validity of the proposed models by implementing a series of numerical examples and further present some noteworthy observations.