Seismic Performance Assessment of Interdependent Lifeline Systems

Lifeline systems such as transportation and utility networks consist of numerous structural components which are spatially distributed and mutually interdependent. The damage to a particular system caused by natural or man-made hazards is propagated to other systems and results in additional losses due to cascading failures. Therefore, understanding the influence of hazards on these interdependent systems is critical to mitigate damage and to perform effective response and recovery efforts. This report focuses on modeling the interdependency between lifeline systems and investigates the effect of such interdependency on the seismic performance of these systems. A probabilistic model is developed to characterize the interdependencies and integrated into a simulation model for estimating the seismic performance of the system. Example analyses show the effect of various levels of interdependency on the performance and demonstrate the importance of considering such interdependencies.National Science Foundation EEC-9801785published or submitted for publicatio