A mechanical and economical based framework to help decision-makers for natural hazards and malicious events impact on infrastructure prevention

TL;DR

This paper presents a combined mechanical and economic framework for assessing infrastructure reliability and failure costs, aiding decision-makers in prioritizing safety investments against natural and malicious hazards.

Contribution

It introduces a novel coupling of mechanical fragility analysis with economic resilience costs, enabling comprehensive infrastructure risk assessment.

Findings

Framework calculates probable failure costs for infrastructure components.

It can analyze all critical network components against various hazards.

Provides indicators to guide safety investment decisions.

Abstract

Many studies in economics deal with the non-reliability cost to assess insurance fees or investment analyses, but none takes into consideration the mechanical aspect of reliability analysis. Other studies in mechanics give some tools and methods to carry out reliability analyses and fragility study. This study developed a framework where economical and mechanical considerations for infrastructure investment decision-making. The theoretical reasoning is here developed to couple mechanical reliability analyses, which are composed of fragility curves, and economical reliability analyses, which is based on resilience cost functions. This coupling is carried out with some probabilistic considerations, giving the concept of "probable cost of failure". The strength of this framework is that it can be used to analyze all possible critical components in a network with all possible natural hazards or malicious event or other undesired events which it is possible to assess its probability of occurrence. The results of the analysis are indicators of probable cost of failure of an infrastructure, which represents the insurance fee. These indicators can be computed for railway lines, for critical components, for events. This tool enables decision-makers to prioritize safety investments and to guide strategic choices. The next step of this study will be to develop smart data analysis tools, because of this framework needs and produces a lot of data, which must be smartly analyzed and presented.