An integrated framework for resilience management of inter-network city infrastructures

Abstract

Functioning, resilient, safe, secure and sustainable city assets, infrastructure systems and networks are essential to underpin our modern society. Cities of various scales are all facing unprecedented challenges of complexities and uncertainties to provide quality services to their citizens, due to growing population, rapid urbanization, changing climate and ineffective infrastructure investment with insufficient plans for disaster risk. These cities are becoming highly fragile and vulnerable to climate change extremes, natural hazards and/or man-made threats, as they have already evolved into intricate webs or system of systems; and the failure of or damage to any part of the infrastructure components could induce cascading effects to all interconnected and interdependent city infrastructures, resulting in catastrophic economic losses and huge social disruptions. Despite great efforts have been attributed to resilience research over the last decades, there still lacks an integrated view of the practices, guidance, methodologies and models, decision supporting tools and solutions for city authorities, inter-network infrastructure operators, the public and all the other stakeholders to work collaboratively to achieve whole city resilience. To fill the gap, a holistic integrated framework for resilience management of inter-network city infrastructures is developed. The framework leverages emerging information and communication technologies, such as internet of things, cloud computing, big data analytics, social network, geographical information system and building information modeling to capture, synthesize, process, standardize, store, share and analyze the static and dynamic data on inter-network city infrastructures’ structures and operation status in order to identify the threats, reduce the vulnerabilities, minimize the impacts of, respond to and recover from man-made or natural incidents. Case study is discussed to verify the framework’s validity.