Resilience of Urban Technical Networks

Abstract

The need to overcome the insulated treatment of urban technical infrastructures according to the nature of the transferred flows is argued. The operation of urban technical networks is affected by endogenous and exogenous random events with consequences for users. By identifying these operational risks and the difficulties of estimating the impact on the performance of the urban technical networks, the authors chose to study the risk management through a concise expression—in relation to the engineering resilience and its connections with vulnerability. Further, the research is confined to the case of urban traffic networks for which the resilience is expressed by the capabilities of these networks of resistance and risk absorption (both motivated by the redundancy in design and execution). The dynamics of the network, in correlation with the resistance and absorption capacities, is introduced by three states for which the signal graph is built. In a stationary regime, the probability of each state is computed. These probabilities allow the calculation of the entropy of the network, relevant for assessing the preservation of the network functionality.

Keywords

• urban system
• network states dynamics
• resilience
• maximum entropy principle