Evaluating Seismic Performance of Water Supply System with Multiple-Functionality-Based Measurement

Abstract

Water supply system (WSS) is an essential part of the infrastructure system of a city and plays an important role in resisting and recovering from natural disasters. Disruption of WSS due to seismic damage of pipelines would impair its city functionalities including fire suppression, water supply of critical facilities and domestic water supply. Some metrics have been proposed in existing literatures to evaluate the performance of WSS subjected to disaster events. Nevertheless, these metrics, aiming at a specific functionality of WSS, e.g. fire suppression or domestic water supply, cannot give a comprehensive evaluation with its multiple functionalities included. In this regard, this paper proposes an economic loss-based metric to evaluate integratedly the consequence of disruption of two functionalities, fire suppression and domestic water supply, of WSS subjected to hazard event. The direct economic losses associated with the two broken functionalities are estimated and compared through the case study of a water distribution network of a city in South-West China subjected to earthquake. It is found that the two functionality losses have small correlation and the strategy to improve the seismic performance should consider both of them integratedly.