Engineering Commons^™

A Network Approach To Interdependent Infrastructure Resilience Assessment For Natural Hazards, Howard Tong

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Natural disasters are increasingly costly to society as they disrupt basic infrastructure functions. Infrastructure managers face challenges from growing urbanization, climate change, and aging infrastructure. Infrastructure resilience is an emerging concept that has been suggested as a solution to this problem; however, it is not yet mature. This thesis proposes to extend an existing dynamic infrastructure resilience quantification methodology to include infrastructure growth capabilities while relaxing some of the original constraints. The methodology uses a complex networks approach to model infrastructure interdependencies that is applied to a case study in the City of Toronto using a newly developed web tool.