Seismic Resilience Enhancement of Urban Water Distribution System Using Restoration Priority of Pipeline Damages

The malfunction of the water distribution system (WDS) following severe earthquakes have significant impacts on the post-earthquake rescue. Moreover, the restoration priority of earthquake-induced pipeline damages plays an important role in improving the post-earthquake serviceability of WDS and the “seismic resilience”. Thus, to enhance the seismic resilience of WDS, this study develops a dynamic cost-benefit method and introduces three existing methods to determine the restoration priority of pipeline damages based on a quantitative resilience evaluation framework. In this resilience evaluation framework, the restoration priority is firstly determined. Then the time-varying performance of post-earthquake WDS is modeled as a discrete event dynamic system. In this model, the system state changes after the reparation of pipeline damage, and the system performance is simulated by a hydraulic model to be consistent with the system state. In this study, this method is also tested and compared with other existing methods, and the results show that the system resilience corresponding to the restoration priority obtained by this method is close to that obtained by the global optimization method with a relative difference of less than 3%, whereas the calculation complexity is about 0.4% of the optimization model. It is concluded that this proposed method is valid.