Design for resilience in infrastructure distribution networks

The recognition that resilience is a critical aspect of infrastructure security has caused the national and homeland security communities to ask “How does one ensure infrastructure resilience?” Previous network resilience analysis methods have generally focused on either pre-disruption prevention investments or post-disruption recovery strategies. This paper expands on those methods by introducing a stochastic optimization model for designing network infrastructure resilience that simultaneously considers pre- and post-disruption activities. The model seeks investment–recovery combinations that minimize the overall cost to a distribution network across a set of disruption scenarios. A set of numerical experiments illustrates how changes to disruption scenarios probabilities affect the optimal resilient design investments.