Infrastructure Resilience Assessment through Control Design

Infrastructure resilience analysis methods generally focus on how disruptions affect the infrastructure’s ability to provide critical goods and services while ignoring resource allocation issues: emergency responders need to know how to spend limited resources to minimize negative impacts and maximize response efficiency. This application of control theory design demonstrates an innovative resilience cost analysis approach that simultaneously considers both infrastructure performance and resource usage in recovery activities. Furthermore, it shows how feedback control design can be used to select optimal recovery strategies that minimize those costs.

• Goal
• Develop a new methodology for quantitatively assessing the resilience of critical infrastructure systems that balances system performance metrics with recovery costs and can identify optimal recovery strategies.
• Approach/Methods/Models

• Build methodology on the foundation of optimal control design mathematics

• Apply method to simple systems-dynamics model

• Identify:

• Optimal recovery strategies that minimize resilience costs
• How to create a more resilient system
• Status, Accomplishments and Next Steps:
• The feasibility of feedback control design to measure and optimize resilience has been proven for linear systems
• Next steps:
• Investigate the use of more generally applicable optimization methods for resilience analysis on nonlinear systems
• Explicitly include recovery resource constraints in numerical optimization methods to address utilization of limited resources for repair and restoration
• Acknowledgements
  • This work was funded by Sandia National Laboratories’ Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program.