Enhancing critical capacity of infrastructure supply chain to improve resilience of associated communities and infrastructure to disaster

Infrastructure are becoming increasingly interconnected in the modern society. Failure of any type of infrastructure due to natural and/or man-made disasters may impact operational capacities of interdependent infrastructure within its supply chain and result in economic and social losses for the associated communities due to disruption in business continuity. Hence, the decision-makers for an infrastructure should consider the need to enhance not only the post-disaster operational capacities of the infrastructure but also that of its interdependent infrastructure.A large number of studies on post-disaster capacity developments for infrastructure systems and associated communities have been conducted for decades. However, a significantly less attention has been paid to (1) investigating disaster impact propagation due to interdependency of infrastructure networks including civil, civic, social, financial, educational, environmental, and cyber infrastructure, diverse stakeholders, and entities in multiple tiers of supply chain, (2) incorporating impacts of upstream infrastructure’s existing operational capabilities (i.e. business continuity) onto downstream infrastructure’ post-disaster capacity development plans, and (3) developing strategies and effective decision-making rules for infrastructure capacity development considering criticalities of its internal and external interdependencies with other infrastructure systems.This research presents a novel methodology for enhancing the resilience of interdependent communities and infrastructure through systematic and strategic ex-ante capacity development of the entities on its supply chain to maintain the business continuity in a post-disaster environment.To accomplish this objective, this study (1) investigated the nature of interdependencies for the different types of infrastructure based on historical case studies, (2) developed a platform for infrastructure supply chain that incorporates internal and external components of various infrastructure at different tiers, (3) developed a methodology to evaluate criticalities and interdependencies of the internal components and external entities in the infrastructure supply chain, and (4) developed an integrated decision support system to select best capacity development strategies by conforming the decision-makers’ customized risk appetite. With these developed platform, methodology, and decision support system, the decision-maker would be able to evaluate strategies that will enhance the resilience of the affected communities and infrastructure.This research, therefore, contributes to the body of knowledge and practice by (1) adding a new dimension to the concept of seven infrastructure layers by systematically analyzing criticalities and interdependencies of both upstream and downstream entities at different tiers, (2) advancing analysis methods of infrastructure interdependencies by constructing an infrastructure supply chain with respect to seven-layer classifications of infrastructure systems, (3) modeling disaster impact propagations by capturing the impact flows through different types of infrastructure at different tiers, and (4) developing a unified methodology to evaluate the post-disaster capacity needs of infrastructure supply chains by flexibly and proactively reflecting the decision-makers customized risk appetites with the different levels of details during the decision-making process.