Building systemic resilience of interdependent infrastructure networks at the national scale

Building resilience of national infrastructure networks to flood and storm events remains a significant challenge in the UK. In recent years extreme flood and storm events across the UK have affected large numbers of infrastructure networks and their customers, resulting in economic damages and losses of the order of tens of millions of pounds. As extreme flood and storm events become more frequent due to climate change, understanding and modelling the impacts of shocks across multiple infrastructure networks to inform resilience planning is a topic of national importance. Government agencies and infrastructure operators have noted that the lack of coherent datasets of interconnected networks and cross-sectoral resilience metrics makes it challenging to plan for and respond to extreme large-scale weather events.

This project aims to address the above challenges by delivering an open-source modelling framework on the DAFNI platform for stress-testing interdependent network resilience against flood and storm events. This framework will be demonstrated through a novel national-scale database of interdependent electricity, transport, water supply, and telecoms networks connected to buildings and population concentrations in the UK. The original research and data collection that created the network risk analysis methodologies was conducted as part of the EPSRC-funded Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium Programme Grants and with the National Infrastructure Commission. This project will update that analysis and implement it in an accessible, reusable and scalable way on the DAFNI platform. The proposed outcomes of the project will include quantifying the impacts of shocks through damages to infrastructure assets and disruptions to people and the economy dependent on infrastructure services. Further outcomes will include assessing cross-sector resilience options for resisting, absorbing and recovering from shock events, by strengthening infrastructure assets, installing service backups and increasing redundancies across networks. Overall, the project will create novel models, datasets, and tools on infrastructure resilience that will be available to academic, government and industry stakeholders via the DAFNI platform.

The project will contribute towards the 'Exploring Resilience Scenarios' theme to enhance the capabilities of the DAFNI Centre of Excellence for Infrastructure Resilience Analysis. Through the DAFNI platform it will: (1) develop collections of models and data; (2) provide tools for exploring and evaluating resilience scenarios across locations and multiple infrastructures; and (3) demonstrate the DAFNI platform to the wider stakeholder community within academia, government and industry.