Reliability of Spatially Distributed Infrastructure

Much like the blood vessel system enables the flow of life to every one of us, so too does the transportation network of cities allow them to live, breath and thrive. This project is focused on analyzing such infrastructure network subjected to natural shock. The work combines new probabilistic and multiscale modeling approaches to provide insights into the performance of spatially distributed infrastructure subject to component disruptions from natural disasters or other sources. Current infrastructure risk assessment approaches are often limited by simplified treatment of the complex network effects or of the variations in disruption over a large spatial region. A common way to overcome these limitations is to estimate disruption given a single scenario disaster, but the probability of occurrence of the scenario is rarely incorporated, hindering risk management based on cost-benefit analysis. These limitations are caused by the impossibility of computing disruptions to complex networks under the huge number of possible disaster scenarios that might occur. This effort aims to overcome current challenges through insights in spatial correlation of disruptions, multiscale infrastructure systems modeling, and advanced reliability algorithms.