A Two-Stage Restoration Resource Allocation Model for Enhancing the Resilience of Interdependent Infrastructure Systems

Abstract

Infrastructure systems play a critical role in delivering essential services that are important to the economy and welfare of society. To enhance the resilience of infrastructure systems after a large-scale disruptive event, determining where and when to invest restoration resources is a challenge for decision makers. Comprehensively considering the recovery time of infrastructure systems and the overall losses resulting from a disaster, this study proposes a two-stage restoration resource allocation model for enhancing the resilience of interdependent infrastructure systems. First, to evaluate the effect of resource allocation during the recovery process, dynamic resilience is selected as the criterion for the recovery of infrastructure systems. Second, taking into consideration the decision makers’ point of view, a two-stage resource allocation model is proposed. The objective of the first stage is to quickly recover the infrastructure systems’ dynamic resilience to meet the basic needs of the users. The second stage is aimed at minimizing the overall losses in the following recovery process. The effects of infrastructure interdependencies on resource allocation are incorporated in the model using the dynamic inoperability input–output model. Through a case study, the proposed approach is compared with other resource allocation strategies. The results show that: (1) the restoration resource allocation strategy obtained from the proposed approach balances the recovery time and the overall losses to infrastructure systems; and (2) the value of the usage cost of the unit restoration resource has a significant impact on the recovery time and the overall losses under different strategies. The proposed model is both effective and efficient in solving the post-disaster resource allocation problem and can provide decision makers with scientific decision support.