Development of a Civil Infrastructure Resilience Assessment Framework

Abstract

Recent disruptive events, such as earthquakes or floods, have caused severe damage to civil infrastructural systems. Thus, there is a need to extend the focus of traditional design practices to consider resilience-based design approaches which can help in defining preventive actions and measures to mitigate the consequences caused by such disruptive events. This paper presents a Civil Infrastructure Resilience Assessment Framework (CIRAF) to assess the seismic fragility and resilience of a single or interconnected civil infrastructural systems following a disruptive event. Once the information regarding the infrastructural system, hazards, fragility databases, components damage state correlation, recovery models, and upgrade models are identified, then the framework can be used to quantify the loss of functionality, recovery time, repair cost, and overall resilience following an extreme event. Bayesian models are used to evaluate the probability of failure of a system, which consists of layers of sub-systems and components. A state-of-the-art engineering tool is also developed using the framework that would enable the stakeholders to compare different upgrade strategies through an easy to use web interface and thus easing the decision-making process. A simplified infrastructural system consisting of 3 components is illustrated in this paper using the CIRAF framework.