ENHANCING RESILIENCE OF INTERDEPENDENT INFRASTRUCTURE NETWORKS THROUGH A CRITICALITY RANKING APPROACH

Critical infrastructures are complex socio-technical systems that provide essential services to modern societies. These systems are often highly interdependent, making them prone to cascading failures that originate elsewhere in the system. Additionally, the risks to these systems are increasing globally, which creates a need to enhance their resilience. The herein presented work addresses these issues through an asset criticality ranking methodology, which considers the different ways in which infrastructures interact, various criticality dimensions, as well as hazard characteristics. More specifically, the complex infrastructure system (which includes multiple infrastructures) is represented as a node-weighted directed multiplex graph, where nodes represent assets and their interactions are shown as links. Three different types of infrastructure interactions are considered. The methodology is applied to a case study of urban flooding hazards in three municipalities in the UK, where several assets of high criticality are identified. These assets belong to multiple infrastructures (e.g. water, power, transport etc.). The approach and methodology are general in nature and can be applied to enhance infrastructure resilience in urban and peri-urban regions.