Infrastructure Performance Oriented Reliability Assessment Using Weighed Stochastic Petri Net

It is now apparent that our nation’s infrastructures and essential utilities have been optimized for reliability in benign operating environments. As such, they are susceptible to cascading failures induced by relatively minor events such weather phenomena, accidental damage to system components, and major events such earthquakes. This paper presents a new kind of integrated modeling method for simulating the reliability of critical infrastructure spatially lifelines for a hazard and the subsequent interdependencies among the interconnected infrastructures. In previous studies, usually the weight of network components is not defined or in some case is assigned by expert idea or complicated network analysis. The new Weighed Stochastic Petri Net (WSPN) modeling approach which is proposed in this paper is based on the graph theory, fragility curves, Stochastic Petri net (SPN) modeling and Markov Chain analysis. In this model by using the simple graph theory parameters, weight of each component is defined in stochastic Petri nets. Therefore the cascading impacts throughout the network and reliability can be assessed based on weighed stochastic Petri nets.