Probabilistic risk assessment of infrastructure networks subjected to hurricanes

An initial investigation towards a probabilistic risk assessment framework for infrastructure systems subjected to hurricanes is presented. An idealized probabilistic spatial-temporal hurricane model is proposed for the purpose of investigating infrastructure performance and redundancy. The investigated infrastructure is an electrical network, corresponding to a synthetic IEEE benchmark system, which is modeled by a physical power flow model. The response of the infrastructure network to hurricane events is evaluated in terms of the overall power loss, considering the power flow characteristics of the network and potential cascading failures. It is found that while the network component failure probabilities are strongly dependent on the hazard characteristics, this does not hold for the overall network damage after simulation of the cascading failures. The computed average power loss level tends to be rather insensitive to the number and combination of initially triggered network components.