Comparability of Water Infrastructure Resilience of Different Urban Structures

Abstract

Urban water distribution systems (WDS) ensure the demand-driven supply of a city at multiple ends. Well-being of the population as well as multiple economic sectors depend on its viability and thereby classify it as a critical infrastructure. Therefore, its behavior when exposed to changes is of interest to water suppliers as well as local decision-makers. It can be determined by resilience metrics, assessing the capability to meet and recover its functioning when exposed to disturbances. These disturbances can occur in form of changes in the water availability, the WDS topology, or the water demand pattern. Since networks as WDS are studied by graph theory, also different graph-theoretical resilience metrics were derived. In this work a well-established topology-based resilience metric is adapted and deployed to assess the present resilience of the urban main-line WDS of the German city of Darmstadt as well as of a suburb in the Rhine-Main region. Thereby, the intercomparability of the resilience for the different urban structures were of interest. Based on this analysis the comparability of different urban main-line WDS regarding their resilience is facilitated. Additionally, the conducted approach to allow for the comparability of absolute resilience values of urban structures of varying size can be applied to different resilience metrics as well as technical systems.