A Capabilities-Based Resilience Assessment Method for Critical Infrastructure System

Understanding and assessing the resilience of critical infrastructure system (CIS) is essential for guiding the development of more resilient infrastructures. There is an urgent need for a comprehensive resilience assessment metric that accurately reflects the intrinsic characteristics of CIS resilience and is applicable across diverse systems. While extensive research has been conducted on CIS resilience assessment, many studies face challenges such as inconsistent assessment indicators, insufficient computational underpinnings, and inadequate attention to the disaster response process. As a result, they fail to provide a thorough, universally applicable assessment of real-world CIS. In this paper, a conceptual model for CIS resilience assessment is developed based on resilience capabilities and an analysis of the disaster response process. Additionally, by extracting multiple characteristics from the system performance evolution curve, which serve as key indicators of resilience capabilities, a comprehensive resilience metric for CIS is proposed. The method for resilience assessment is also derived. The feasibility and applicability of the proposed resilience metric and assessment method are validated through simulations of a 9-bus power network under three earthquake scenarios and three resilience improvement measures. Finally, we discuss how to apply the resilience assessment method proposed in this paper to interdependent critical infrastructure systems and verify the correctness of the method through practical cases. This study provides a foundation for decision-making in disaster prediction and warning, classification of emergency response levels, and assessment of the overall safety of infrastructure systems under disaster impacts.