Evaluating the reliability of infrastructure networks by resilience analysis

Abstract

Infrastructure networks are highly interrelated to the prosperity, security, economy, and public health of the modern world. As such, any disruption in the infrastructure network poses a significant damage to society, therefore this paper presents a resilience analysis approach to evaluate the reliability of infrastructure networks so as to quantitatively determine the ability of a network to cope with complexity under disruption as well as to develop foresight in safety management. Under resilience analysis, an infrastructure network is modeled as an undirected graph with nodes and edges, and the resilience of the whole network can then be evaluated by the weighted sum of the resilience of all the reliable independent connection paths between all pairs of nodes. The proposed approach is also illustrated in a portion of a rail network, and the results indicate that the ability of the network to cope with complexity under disruption can be explicitly known. © 2012 IEEE.