Attribute-based intervention development for increasing resilience of urban drainage systems

Area of Science:

• Environmental Engineering
• Urban Water Management
• System Resilience

Background:

• Resilience building in infrastructure often relies on specific attributes like redundancy.
• The effectiveness of attribute-based approaches for guaranteeing resilient performance requires further investigation.
• Combined sewer systems (CSS) are critical urban infrastructure susceptible to failure.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore the impact of attribute-based interventions on the performance-based resilience of combined sewer systems.
• To assess the suitability of increasing distributed storage and reducing imperviousness as resilience-building strategies.
• To determine if attribute-based interventions can inadvertently decrease system resilience.

Main Methods:

• Utilized 250 virtual case studies of combined sewer systems.
• Simulated the effects of two attribute-based interventions: increasing distributed storage and reducing imperviousness.
• Evaluated interventions against performance-based resilience measures under system failure scenarios.

Main Results:

• Attribute-based interventions, specifically increasing distributed storage and reducing imperviousness, improved performance in most case studies during system failure.
• However, the study also demonstrated that the development of attribute-based interventions can lead to a reduction in overall system resilience.
• The effectiveness of these interventions is case-specific and not universally guaranteed.

Conclusions:

• While attribute-based interventions can enhance combined sewer system resilience, they do not guarantee it and may sometimes decrease it.
• Further research is essential to understand the complex relationship between specific attributes and system-wide performance-based resilience.
• A nuanced approach is required when implementing attribute-based strategies for urban water infrastructure resilience.