Review on modeling the societal impact of infrastructure disruptions due to disasters

• Clarify the definition and types of societal impact of infrastructure disruptions. • Summarize the ideas, pros, and cons of four societal impact modeling approaches. • The four modeling approaches are cross-compared to facilitate their application. • Future research directions are illustrated from perspectives of the impact measurement, model integration , cross validation , and decision tools. Infrastructure systems play a critical role in providing essential products and services for the functioning of modern society; however, they are vulnerable to disasters, and their service disruptions can cause severe societal impacts. To protect infrastructure from disasters and reduce potential impacts, great achievements have been made in modeling interdependent infrastructure systems in past decades. In recent years, scholars have gradually shifted their research focus to understanding and modeling societal impacts of disruptions considering the fact that infrastructure systems are critical because of their role in societal functioning, especially in situations of modern societies. Exploring how infrastructure disruptions impair society has become a key field of study. By comprehensively reviewing relevant studies, this paper demonstrated the definition and types of societal impact of infrastructure disruptions, and summarized the modeling approaches into four types: extended infrastructure modeling approaches, empirical approaches, agent-based approaches, and big data-driven approaches. For each approach, this paper organized relevant literature in terms of modeling ideas, advantages, and disadvantages. Furthermore, the four approaches were compared according to several criteria, including the input data, applicable societal impact types, spatial scales, and application contexts. Finally, this paper illustrated the challenges and future research directions in the field.

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Publication Details

Journal
Reliability Engineering & System Safety
Published
2025-02-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ress.2025.110879
Citations
15
Primary Topic
Infrastructure Resilience and Vulnerability Analysis
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
14.30
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article

Review on modeling the societal impact of infrastructure disruptions due to disasters

Ali Mostafavi, Hirokazu Tatano, Yongsheng Yang, Huan Liu
15 citations
Reliability Engineering & System Safety
Infrastructure Resilience and Vulnerability Analysis
14.30
article

Review on modeling the societal impact of infrastructure disruptions due to disasters

Ali Mostafavi, Hirokazu Tatano, Yongsheng Yang, Huan Liu
article en
15 citations

Abstract

• Clarify the definition and types of societal impact of infrastructure disruptions. • Summarize the ideas, pros, and cons of four societal impact modeling approaches. • The four modeling approaches are cross-compared to facilitate their application. • Future research directions are illustrated from perspectives of the impact measurement, model integration , cross validation , and decision tools. Infrastructure systems play a critical role in providing essential products and services for the functioning of modern society; however, they are vulnerable to disasters, and their service disruptions can cause severe societal impacts. To protect infrastructure from disasters and reduce potential impacts, great achievements have been made in modeling interdependent infrastructure systems in past decades. In recent years, scholars have gradually shifted their research focus to understanding and modeling societal impacts of disruptions considering the fact that infrastructure systems are critical because of their role in societal functioning, especially in situations of modern societies. Exploring how infrastructure disruptions impair society has become a key field of study. By comprehensively reviewing relevant studies, this paper demonstrated the definition and types of societal impact of infrastructure disruptions, and summarized the modeling approaches into four types: extended infrastructure modeling approaches, empirical approaches, agent-based approaches, and big data-driven approaches. For each approach, this paper organized relevant literature in terms of modeling ideas, advantages, and disadvantages. Furthermore, the four approaches were compared according to several criteria, including the input data, applicable societal impact types, spatial scales, and application contexts. Finally, this paper illustrated the challenges and future research directions in the field.

Reliability Engineering & System SafetyVol. 257
Kyoto University (JP), Beijing Normal University (CN), Texas A&M University (US)
Climate action
Openalex Percentile: Top 1%
Infrastructure Resilience and Vulnerability Analysis
14.30
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