Resilience Assessment of Repair Strategies Against Localized Attacks for Infrastructure Protection

The devastating effects of unpredictable failures have urged infrastructure system to be more resilient. In this paper, the study is mainly focused on assessing the recovery planning after localized attacks. Localized attacks are typically natural disaster-induced attacks that may cause damage in only a specific area within the infrastructure system. The damaged infrastructure system after the attack can be recovered through either one of the three commonly used strategies: periphery recovery (PR), preferential recovery based on nodal weight (PRNW), and localized recovery (LR). In this paper, a comparison framework was developed to evaluate and compare these recovery strategies based on the resulting resilience value after the recovery plan is completed. To assess which recovery strategy resulted in the highest resilience, a case study of water distribution infrastructure network is presented. The results showed that the efficiency of a recovery strategy depends on the recovery sequence and time to fully recover. Higher resilience value is also associated with the recovery speed and the ability of the system to recover to the maximum possible percentage of damaged components within the desired period of time. The future work will be directed towards developing a hybrid approach between repair strategies that could be used to ensure successful repairs with the minimum resources possible while achieving the maximum resilience value. This work also hopes to serve as building blocks towards the development of high resilient infrastructure systems.