I-Corps: A Resilience Analytics Technology for Enhancing Seismic Rehabilitation Decision Making for Water Infrastructure Systems

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of technology to assess, analyze, and report water infrastructure resilience to disaster events. U.S. water infrastructure comprises more than 2.2 million miles of pipes, most of which are underground and unseen by millions of consumers. A large proportion of these pipes are located in areas vulnerable to earthquakes. This project targets water utilities in these critical earthquake zones (around one-fourth of all utilities in the U.S.) as potential customers. These water utilities must confront deep uncertainties about their aging water pipe networks and their ability to sustain natural and human-induced earthquakes. The utilities have to conduct a seismic vulnerability assessment and identify critical pipes in their networks that should be rehabilitated. This project may help water utilities in critical earthquake zones that need to make difficult rehabilitation decisions about their water infrastructure system. This I-Corps project is based on the development of water infrastructure systems for a highly uncertain environment. Despite technological advances, water utility managers are often limited in their understanding of seismic concerns. The proposed resilience analytics technology provides a software application backed up with risk-based robust decision analytics algorithms to identify the best seismic rehabilitation policy with controllable risk aversion levels for a city-level network in a few minutes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.