Modeling the time-varying performance of electrical infrastructure during post disaster recovery using tensors

Modeling the risk and resilience of infrastructure requires a general framework that combines different infrastructure and captures their dependencies and interdependencies, while considering their deterioration and recovery processes. Developing a mathematical framework is challenging for a number of reasons. Specifically, when considering the electrical infrastructure, the information on the infrastructure characteristics is often unavailable or incomplete. In addition, failure mechanisms pertaining to electric power flow can cause cascading failures in the electrical infrastructure. Finally, electrical infrastructure typically require modeling a region significantly larger than the region of immediate interest. This chapter presents a general framework to overcome the listed challenges. The framework models dependencies using dynamic infrastructure interfaces, and supports non-linear flow analyses and state-dependent deterioration and recovery modeling. The chapter also provides insights into boundary and resolution selection for infrastructure characterization. The framework is illustrated by modeling the performance of the electrical infrastructure of Shelby County, Tennessee in a post-earthquake scenario.