A future-oriented agent-based simulation to improve urban critical infrastructure resilience

Abstract

The conversion to smart grids opens up a wide amount of possibilities to better control power distributions. The benefit is not only limited to a more secured and economical power distribution. It may also enable to bridge the gap between grid reliability management and disaster response. In particular under critical circumstances like grid instabilities, electricity may be missing or shortening. While distributing limited resources, the consideration of costumer’s performances, their criticalities and vulnerabilities regarding lack of electricity and other vital services, and the focus on a sufficient continued supply of critical services in an urban area may have a significant leverage effect on urban resilience. To benefit from this effect, we introduce and discuss the foundation of an agent-based system for the purpose of building urban resilience through a decentralized and agent-autonomous coordination of CI services in a city during an emergency situation. Therefore, we introduce the specification of decision-making in the context of critical infrastructures and disaster management in this chapter. Furthermore, we discuss the basic ideas of modelling critical infrastructures as agents and we demonstrate how their functionality is implemented in the model. A key topic of this chapter is a discussion about the design of the agent’s negotiation and its beneficial advantages in responding to critical infrastructure disruptions and in building more resilient cities.