Effective Resilience Assessment Methodology for Water Utilities (ERASMUS)

Availability of safe drinking water is key for societal welfare. Water infrastructure face diverse potential threats: natural disruptive events like hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes, and man-made disruptors such as deliberate attack, vandalism, or accidents. Even slow-developing processes like drought or ageing are possible threats in the long term. Previous approaches to infrastructure risk management focused on protection are shifting towards a dual approach including system resilience. This paper presents a novel methodology for estimating the probability of water infrastructure resilience. In this methodology, resilience is defined in terms of performance loss, recovery time, and recovery cost. A resilient system should be able to withstand damage and recover within acceptable time and cost constraints. A Stochastic Simulation approach is applied on a network model. Failure scenarios are developed using asset failure patterns according to disruption type and specific probability distributions. Finally, the damaged network recovers using probabilistic available resources.