Post-Disaster Performance and Restoration Sequences of Interdependent Critical Infrastructure Systems Considering Various Socioeconomic Impacts

Abstract

The failures of interdependent critical infrastructure systems (CISs) caused by disasters could result in significant impacts on the economy and society of cities. Although existing studies have proposed several socioeconomic impact indicators of CIS failures, using these indicators as optimization objectives of restoration sequences, most of them only selected one indicator and failed to reveal their differences. This study aims to analyze the differences between various socioeconomic impact indicators in evaluating post-disaster CIS performance and to identify their effects on the optimized restoration sequences. To achieve this objective, this study simulates the failure propagation and recovery process of CISs, based on network modeling, and constructs six socioeconomic impact indicators for evaluating CIS performance and optimizing the restoration sequence. Then, this study analyzes the effects of different socioeconomic impact indicators by comparing the differences between post-disaster CIS performance, as well as the corresponding restoration sequence and recovery efficiency, among five groups. The results indicate that ignoring social impacts would significantly underestimate the consequences of CIS failures, and the restoration sequence aimed at minimizing social impact differs from other methods, with the recovery efficiency in regards to the social impact notably lower than that of the economic impact. This implies that evaluating the multidimensional social impacts is essential for accurately understanding the worst-case consequences of CIS failures with a bottom-line perspective.