Integrating Restoration and Scheduling Decisions for Disrupted Interdependent Infrastructure Systems

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Authors:

Burak Cavdaroglu
(email)

Erik Hammel
(email)

Cavdaroglu, Sharkey, and Wallace are with the Department of Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York 12180-3590, U.S.A. Hammel and Mitchell are with the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York 12180-3590, U.S.A.

Annals of Operations Research, 203, pages 279-294, March 2013. (Online first, September 5, 2011.)

Abstract:

We consider the problem faced by managers of critical civil interdependent infrastructure systems of restoring essential public services after a non-routine event causes disruptions to these services. In order to restore the services, we must determine the set of components (or tasks) that will be temporarily installed or repaired, assign these tasks to work groups, and then determine the schedule of each work group to complete the tasks assigned to it. These restoration planning and scheduling decisions are often undertaken in an independent, sequential manner. We provide a mathematical model that integrates the restoration and planning decisions that specifically accounts for the interdependencies between the infrastructure systems. The objective function of this problem provides a measure of how well the services are being restored over the horizon of the restoration plan, rather than just focusing on the performance of the systems after all restoration efforts are complete. We test our model on realistic data representing infrastructure systems in New York City. Our computational results demonstrate that we can provide integrated restoration and scheduling plans of high quality with limited computational resources. We also discuss the benefits of integrating the restoration and scheduling decisions.

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