Assessing Socioeconomic Impacts of Cascading Infrastructure Disruptions in a Dynamic Human-Infrastructure Network

Abstract

The functionality of modern cities relies heavily on interdependent infrastructure systems such as those for water, power, and transportation. Disruptions often propagate within and across physical infrastructure networks and result in catastrophic consequences. The reaction of communities to disasters (e.g., seeking alternatives) may further transfer and aggravate the burden on surviving infrastructures, which may facilitate cascading secondary disruptions. Hence, a holistic analysis framework that integrates infrastructure interdependencies and community behaviors is needed to evaluate a citys vulnerability to disruptions and to assess the impact of a disaster. U.S. Army doctrine requires that commanders understand, visualize, and describe the infrastructure component of the Joint Operating Environment to accomplish the Armys missions of protecting, restoring, and developing infrastructure. To this end, a game-theoretical equilibrium model has been developed in a multilayer infrastructure network, to systematically investigate the mutual influence between the infrastructures and the communities. In this model, two types of infrastructure failure patterns are formulated to capture general network interdependencies; network equilibrium is ex-tended into infrastructure and community systems to address redistribution of demand for life-supporting resources; the societal impact of disasters is estimated based on resource demand loss, cost increase, and total infrastructure failure. A real-world case study was implemented to demonstrate the proposed model and algorithm, and to reveal insights.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 01, 2016
Accession Number
AD1012947

Entities

People

  • Jeanne Roningen
  • Liqun Lu
  • Natalie Myers
  • Patrick Edwards
  • Scott Tweddale
  • Xin Wang
  • Yanfeng Ouyang
  • Zhaodong Wang

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Engineered Resilient Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Case Studies
  • Commerce
  • Control Systems
  • Disasters
  • Emergencies
  • Engineers
  • Failure Mode And Effect Analysis
  • Genetic Algorithms
  • Geographic Information Systems
  • Graphical User Interface
  • Humanitarian Assistance
  • Infrastructure
  • Logistics
  • Military Operations
  • United States
  • Urban Areas

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Emergency Management and Homeland Security.
  • Strategic Security Studies