Quantifying the Resilience of Water Supply Infrastructure Systems: The Role of Infrastructure Interdependency

The water supply system is one of the critical infrastructure systems that provides lifeline services to society and to other infrastructure systems. Assessing and quantifying the resilience of water supply systems improves the understanding of the system’s behavior under stressed conditions and assists decision making in resilience enhancement efforts. Most of the current resilience quantification frameworks in the literature are either hazard-specific, system-limited, or limited to one or two resilience capacities. This study introduces a new framework for quantifying the resilience of water supply infrastructure with the consideration of its interdependencies with the electric distribution system. The proposed framework assesses three resilience capacities; absorptive, adaptive, and restorative resilience against three types of disruptive events: random failures, natural disasters, and deliberate attacks. The quantification framework is implemented in a network model that examines the water system’s network topology and hydraulic performance. A case study of a water supply system is presented to demonstrate the process.