CIVIL INFRASTRUCTURE RESILIENCE ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORK (CIRAF)

Abstract

Disruptive events (e.g., earthquakes or floods) causes severe damage to civil infrastructural systems, and there is need to extend the focus of traditional design practices to include resilience-based design techniques which can help in defining preventive actions and measures to mitigate their effect. This study presents a framework to assess fragility and resilience of a single or interconnected civil infrastructural system following a disruptive event. Once the specifications regarding the infrastructural system, fragility databases, component's damage state correlation, recovery models, and upgrade models are identified, then the framework can be used to quantify overall resilience following an extreme event. A state of the art engineering tool is also developed using the framework that would enable the stakeholders to compare different upgrade strategies through an easy to use web interface. A case study of typical nuclear power plant is used to assess resilience by considering multiple upgrade strategies using the framework.