Modelling of physical systems for resilience assessment

Natural hazards, such as earthquakes, floods, or storms may have significant socio-economic impacts in terms of injuries/casualties, disruption of essential services, reconstruction costs, etc. They can also cause major accidents at hazardous industry (so-called Natech accidents). Earthquakes in particular are a major threat to communities in several parts of the world and a number of events that have hit densely populated areas or ones where significant economic activities were hosted, have shown that the consequences, e.g. casualties, economic losses and disruption of services, may be disproportionate to the damage of the built environment and that significant time and resources are necessary to regain pre-event conditions. Furthermore, modern societies rely heavily on critical infrastructures and lifelines for their functioning but also in the aftermath of a disruptive event in order to support response actions. However, modern infrastructures exhibit an intrinsic complexity that needs to be thoroughly understood in order to be in a position to forecast the extent of cascade effects through the network of interconnected and interdepended infrastructures. The paper presents an overview of the latest developments in the modelling of critical infrastructures and the built environment for assessing their resilience to natural and man-made hazards, and climate change. It covers conceptual resilience frameworks, tools and methods to design for resilience, interdependencies modelling, complex network theory as well as the links among technological and societal systems.

TSIONIS Georgios;  CAVERZAN Alessio;  KRAUSMANN Elisabeth;  GIANNOPOULOS Georgios;  GALBUSERA Luca;  KOURTI Naouma; 

2018-11-15

CRC Press

JRC109249

978-1-138-62633-1 (print),   

2161-3907 (print),