Policies for Multi-Agency Recovery of Physical Infrastructure After Disasters

TL;DR

This paper models the optimal allocation and sequencing of repair efforts by multiple agencies to restore damaged infrastructure components after disasters, considering deterioration and repair dynamics to maximize fully repaired components.

Contribution

It provides a characterization of optimal policies for repair allocation and sequencing under different rate conditions, including a guaranteed approximation when deterioration rates are high.

Findings

Optimal policies are characterized for different repair and deterioration rate regimes.

When repair rates exceed deterioration rates, the optimal allocation is identified.

A policy guarantees at least half the repairs of an optimal policy under certain homogeneous conditions.

Abstract

We consider a scenario where multiple infrastructure components have been damaged after a disaster and the health value of each component continues to deteriorate if it is not being targeted by a repair agency, until it fails irreversibly. There are multiple agencies that seek to repair the components and there is an authority whose task is to allocate the components to the agencies within a given budget, so that the total number of components that are fully repaired by the agencies is maximized. We characterize the optimal policy for allocation and repair sequencing when the repair rates are sufficiently larger than the deterioration rates. For the case when the deterioration rates are larger than or equal to the repair rates, the rates are homogeneous across the components, and the costs charged by the entities for repair are equal, we characterize a policy for allocation and repair sequencing that permanently repairs at least half the number of components as that by an optimal policy.