Critical Infrastructures (CIs), which serve as the foundation of our modern society, are facing increasing risks from cyber threats, physical attacks, and natural disasters. Additionally, the interdependencies between CIs throughout their operational lifespan can also significantly impact their integrity and safety. As a result, enhancing the resilience of CIs has emerged as a top priority for many countries, including the European Union. This involves not only understanding the threats/attacks themselves but also gaining knowledge about the areas and infrastructures that could potentially be affected. A European Union-funded project named PRECINCT (Preparedness and Resilience Enforcement for Critical INfrastructure Cascading Cyber-Physical Threats), under the Horizon 2020 program, tries to connect private and public stakeholders of CIs in a specific geographical area. The key objective of this project is to establish a common cyber-physical security management approach that will ensure the protection of both citizens and infrastructures, creating a secure territory. This paper presents the components of PRECINCT, including a directory of PRECINCT Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) blueprints. These blueprints support CI communities in designing integrated ecosystems, operating and replicating PRECINCT components (or toolkits). The integration enables coordinated security and resilience management, incorporating improved 'installation-specific' security solutions. Additionally, Serious Games (SG), and Digital Twins (DT) are a significant part of this project, serving as a novel vulnerability evaluation method for analysing complicated multi-system cascading effects in the PRECINCT Living Labs (LLs). The use of SG supports the concentrated advancement of innovative resilience enhancement services.
The time-dependent resilience of an in-service aging structure provides quantitative measure of the structural ability to prepare for, adapt to, withstand and recover from disruptive events. Resilience models have been proposed in the literature to evaluate the resilience of aging structures subjected to discrete load processes, which are, however, not applicable to handle resilience problems considering continuous load processes. In this paper, a new method is developed to evaluate the time-dependent resilience of aging structures subjected to a continuous load process. The proposed method serves as the complement of the existing resilience models addressing discrete load processes, and takes into account the aging effects of the structural resistance/capacity and the nonstationarity in loads as a result of climate change. A structure suffers from a damage state upon the occurrence of an upcrossing of the load effect with respect to the resistance/capacity, leading to the reduction of the performance function, followed by a recovery process that restores the performance. The proposed method enables the time-dependent resilience to be evaluated via a closed form solution. It is also revealed that, the proposed resilience model takes an extended form of the existing formula for upcrossing-based time-dependent reliability, thus establishing a unified framework for the two quantities. The applicability of the proposed method is demonstrated through examining the time-dependent resilience of a residential building subjected to wind load. The effects of key factors on resilience, including the nonstationarity and correlation structure of the load process, as well as the resistance/capacity deterioration scenario, are investigated through an example. In particular, the structural resilience would be overestimated if ignoring the potential impacts of climate change, which is a relatively non-conservative evaluation.
Lifelines are critical infrastructure systems characterized by a high level of interdependency that can lead to cascading failures after any disaster. Many approaches can be used to analyze infrastructural interdependencies, but they are usually not able to describe the sequence of events during emergencies. Therefore, interdependencies need to be modeled also taking into account the time effects. The methodology proposed in this paper is based on a modified version of the Input-output Inoperability Model and returns the probabilities of failure for each node of the system. Lifelines are modeled using graph theory, while perturbations, representing a natural or man-made disaster, are applied to the elements of the network following predetermined rules. The cascading effects among interdependent networks have been simulated using a spatial multilayer approach, while the use of an adjacency tensor allows to consider the temporal dimension and its effects. The method has been tested on a case study based on the 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear disaster. Different configurations of the system have been analyzed and their probability of occurrence evaluated. Two models of the nuclear power plant have been developed to evaluate how different spatial scales and levels of detail affect the results.
Mixed Reality (MR) Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) offer a hitherto underutilized set of advantages compared to conventional 3D scanners. These benefits, inherent to MR-HMDs albeit not originally intended for such applications, encompass the freedom of hand movement, hand tracking capabilities, and real-time mesh visualization. This study leverages these attributes to enhance indoor scanning process. The primary innovation lies in the conceptualization of manual-positioned MR virtual seeds for the purpose of indoor point cloud segmentation via a region-growing approach. The proposed methodology is effectively implemented using the HoloLens 2 platform. An application is designed to enable the remote placement of virtual tags based on the user's visual focus on the MR-HMD display. This non-intrusive interface is further enriched with expedited tag saving and deletion functionalities, as well as augmented tag visualization through overlaying them on real-world objects. To assess the practicality of the proposed method, a comprehensive real-world case study spanning an area of 330 s2 is conducted. Remarkably, the survey demonstrates remarkable efficiency, with 20 virtual tags swiftly deployed, each requiring a mere 2 s for precise positioning. Subsequently, these virtual tags are employed as seeds in a region-growing algorithm for point cloud segmentation. The accuracy of virtual tag positioning is found to be exceptional, with an average error of 2.4 ± 1.8 cm. Importantly, the user experience is significantly enhanced, leading to improved seed positioning and, consequently, more accurate final segmentation results.
Despite recognition of the relationship between infrastructure resilience and community recovery, very limited empirical evidence exists regarding the extent to which the disruptions in and restoration of infrastructure services contribute to the speed of community recovery. To address this gap, this study investigates the relationship between community and infrastructure systems in the context of hurricane impacts, focusing on the recovery dynamics of population activity and power infrastructure restoration. Empirical observational data were utilized to analyze the extent of impact, recovery duration, and recovery types of both systems in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida. The study reveals three key findings. First, power outage duration positively correlates with outage extent until a certain impact threshold is reached. Beyond this threshold, restoration time remains relatively stable regardless of outage magnitude. This finding underscores the need to strengthen power infrastructure, particularly in extreme weather conditions, to minimize outage restoration time. Second, power was fully restored in 70% of affected areas before population activity levels normalized. This finding suggests the role infrastructure functionality plays in post-disaster community recovery. Quicker power restoration did not equate to rapid population activity recovery due to other possible factors such as transportation, housing damage, and business interruptions. Finally, if power outages last beyond two weeks, community activity resumes before complete power restoration, indicating adaptability in prolonged outage scenarios. This implies the capacity of communities to adapt to ongoing power outages and continue daily life activities. These findings offer valuable empirical insights into the interaction between human activities and infrastructure systems, such as power outages, during extreme weather events. They also enhance our empirical understanding of how infrastructure resilience influences community recovery. By identifying the critical thresholds for power outage functionality and duration that affect population activity recovery, this study furthers our understanding of how infrastructure performance intertwines with community functioning in extreme weather conditions. Hence, the findings can inform infrastructure operators, emergency managers, and public officials about the significance of resilient infrastructure in life activity recovery of communities when facing extreme weather hazards.
The swift recuperation of communities following natural hazards heavily relies on the efficiency of transportation systems, facilitating the timely delivery of vital resources and manpower to reconstruction sites. This paper delves into the pivotal role of transportation systems in aiding the recovery of built environments, proposing an evaluative metric that correlates transportation capacity with the speed of post-earthquake recovery. Focusing on optimizing urban population capacity in the aftermath of earthquakes, the study comprehensively examines the impact of pre-earthquake measures such as enhancing building or bridge seismic performance on post-earthquake urban population capacity. The methodology is demonstrated through an analysis of Beijing’s transportation system, elucidating how enhancements to transportation infrastructure fortify the resilience of built environments. Additionally, the concept of a resource supply rate is introduced to gauge the level of logistical support available after an earthquake. This rate tends to decrease when transportation damage is significant or when the demands for repairs overwhelm available resources, indicating a need for retrofitting. Through sensitivity analysis, this study explores how investments in the built environment or logistical systems can increase the resource supply rate, thereby contributing to more resilient urban areas in the face of seismic challenges.
The community's resilience in the face of natural hazards relies heavily on the rapid and efficient restoration of electric power networks, which plays a critical role in emergency response, economic recovery, and the functionality of essential lifeline and social infrastructure systems. Leveraging the recent data revolution, the digital twin (DT) concept emerges as a promising tool to enhance the effectiveness of post-disaster recovery efforts. This paper introduces a novel framework for post-hurricane electric power restoration using a hybrid DT approach that combines physics-based and data-driven models by utilizing a dynamic Bayesian network. By capturing the complexities of power system dynamics and incorporating the road network's influence, the framework offers a comprehensive methodology to guide real-time power restoration efforts in post-disaster scenarios. A discrete event simulation is conducted to demonstrate the proposed framework's efficacy. The study showcases how the electric power restoration DT can be monitored and updated in real-time, reflecting changing conditions and facilitating adaptive decision-making. Furthermore, it demonstrates the framework's flexibility to allow decision-makers to prioritize essential, residential, and business facilities and compare different restoration plans and their potential effect on the community.
This paper proposes a set of nonparametric statistical tools for analyzing the system resilience of civil structures and infrastructure and its migration upon changes in critical system parameters. The work is founded on the classic theoretic framework that system resilience is defined in multiple dimensions for a constructed system. Consequentially, system resilience can lose its parametric form as a random variable, falling into the realm of nonparametric statistics. With this nonparametric shift, traditional distribution-based statistics are ineffective in characterizing the migration of system resilience due to the variation of system parameters. Three statistical tools are proposed under the nonparametric statistical resilience analysis (npSRA) framework, including nonparametric copula-based sensitivity analysis, two-sample resilience test analysis, and a novel tool for resilience attenuation analysis. To demonstrate the use of this framework, we focus on electric distribution systems, commonly found in many urban, suburban, and rural areas and vulnerable to tropical storms. A novel procedure for considering resourcefulness parameters in the socioeconomic space is proposed. Numerical results reveal the complex statistical relations between the distributions of system resilience, physical aging, and socioeconomic parameters for the power distribution system. The proposed resilience distance computing and resilience attenuation analysis further suggests two proper nonparametric distance metrics, the Earth Moving Distance (EMD) metric and the Cramévon Mises (CVM) metric, for characterizing the migration of system resilience for electric distribution systems.