A Spatial Decision Support System for Prioritizing Repair Interventions on Power Networks

The business continuity of services provided by Critical Infrastructures is vital in order to ensure the security, the economy and the public’s health of a nation. Delays and bad recovery strategies after disasters or failures can lead to impairing impacts in terms of injury to people, environmental pollution and loss of time, money and resources. In such a context, the adoption of a spatial Decision Support System (DSS) might play a crucial role in order to help operators to adopt the best recovery strategy in the shortest possible time frame. Current approaches do not consider the problem of assigning an intervention location to a maintenance crew and do not account for the effective time needed for emergency intervention. In this paper we develop a novel spatial multi-criteria DSS methodology for prioritizing repair interventions on power networks. The multi criteria strategy is solved by the adoption of Incomplete Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) which computes holistic assignment costs as the result of the combination of multiple and possibly conflicting metrics of cost. Then, we use the holistic costs as the basis for a task assignment phase that is based on the Hungarian algorithm. The proposed strategy has been implemented as a module in the Decision Support System, namely Critical Infrastructure Protection Risk Analysis and Forecast (CIPCast), whose outputs are represented on a web-based Geographic Information System (GIS) platform. The effectiveness of the proposed multi-criteria strategy has been validated via a real case study on the Rome City electrical distribution network.