Systems engineering approach to the reliability of complex civil infrastructure

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The dams and hydropower industry has a demand to characterize the risk associated with its operations, and in particular, the risk of dam failure. In current practice, the capability to reliably estimate risk remains very weak. The reasons are essentially all due to the fact that the existing capability to characterize dam risk is the "extreme event" philosophy of dam safety that prevailed in the 1970's and 1980's. In terms of this philosophy, there could be no consideration of combinations of lesser floods and earthquakes. Beyond these physical dam safety concerns, this traditional philosophy does not consider operator error or procedural failures in any way, nor does it embody any consideration of institutional failures or contributions to risk. In particular the problem of "uncommon combinations of problems that individually are not uncommon" is omitted completely. Recent research has revealed that systems analysis and engineering has the potential to provide a philosophy, framework, and modeling approach to address many of these weaknesses and omissions in current capability of the power industry to characterize risk from dams, and advance beyond what is at best a lower bound estimate of the risk. The system modeling also has the potential to contribute to many other operational aspects such as whole-life-cycle asset management, water management policy and stakeholder involvement, and reservoir operation and maintenance. The proposed research will (a) develop the second generation risk analysis methodology for complex hydropower systems of dams and reservoirs. The proposed methodology will be based on general systems theory and system dynamics simulation in particular. Verification of the methodology will (b) include a real hydropower system reliability analysis. An integrated system dynamics modelling environment will be built together with the industry partner and applied to various types of hydropower system configurations. The proposed research will be conducted using case studies made available by the industry partner - BC Hydro, Burnaby, BC.