Urban Infrastructure Network Resilience

TSL has been developing a resilience assessment framework for interdependent urban infrastructure networks, with an initial focus on urban rail networks and their dependencies upon power and communication networks. This research is led by TSL researcher Nils Goldbeck and is featured in a recent publication with the journal of Reliability Engineering & System Safety.

Our research was inspired by an observation that there exists an increasing degree of interdependency among civil infrastructure systems, which has the potential to exacerbate the impacts of disruptive events through cascading failures, hindered asset repairs and network congestion.

Current modelling techniques fall short of fully capturing such effects. To address this gap, we developed an integrated, dynamic modelling framework that combines network and asset representations of infrastructure systems. A scenario tree generation algorithm is used to capture the stochastic nature of asset failures.

This framework can be used to determine an optimal response strategy to disruptions, consisting of a redistribution of network flows and the optimal deployment of repair resources. Our paper includes a case study focusing on the threat of flooding to London’s metro and electric power networks.