Risk assessment for infrastructure systems subject to natural hazards

Modern societies necessitate reliable access to resources that infrastructure networks supply: power, water, gas and oil, transportation and telecommunication. Even moderate service disruptions of these networks often lead to sizeable losses and affect public health and safety. This effect is pronounced in the context of natural hazards such as tropical cyclones or winter storms which can lead to large scale system damages.

In order to contribute to a better risk estimation, we work on a probabilistic risk assessment framework for civil infrastructure systems. The investigated infrastructure type is electrical power transmission networks.

Network reliability and vulnerability is studied from several angles, combining insights from topological characteristics of networks and insights from DC power flow models that account for the dynamics of the power flow and for potential cascading failures in the network after initial disturbances. A main goal is the identification of distinctive weak components in the network to develop improvement strategies e.g. with regard towards a better topology.