Quantifying restoration time of pipelines after earthquakes

Abstract

Critical infrastructures are an integral part of our society and economy. Services like gas supply or water networks are expected to be available at all times since a service failure may incur catastrophic consequences to the public health, safety, and financial capacity of the society. Several resilience strategies have been examined to reduce disaster risk and evaluate the downtime of infrastructures following destructive events. This paper introduces an indicator-based downtime estimation model for buried infrastructures (i.e., water and gas networks). The model distinguishes the important aspects that contribute to determining the downtime of buried infrastructure following a hazardous event. The proposed downtime model relies on two inference methods for its computation, Fuzzy Logic (FL) and Bayesian Network (BN), which are adapted for the current application. Finally, through a case scenario, a comparison of the two inference methods, in terms of results and limitations, is presented. Results show that both methods incorporate intuitive knowledge and/or historical data for defining fuzzy rules (in FL) and estimating conditional probabilities (in BN). The difference stands in the interpretation of the outcome. The output of the FL is a membership that defines how well the downtime fits the fuzzy levels while the BN output is a probability distribution that represents how likely the downtime is in a certain state. Nevertheless, both approaches can be utilized by decision-makers to easily estimate the time to restore the functionality of buried infrastructures and plan preventive safety measures accordingly.