A coordinated repair routing problem for post-disaster recovery of interdependent infrastructure networks

Disasters may cause significant damages and long-lasting failures in lifeline infrastructure networks (such as gas, power and water), which must be recovered quickly to resume providing essential services to the affected communities. While making repair plans, it is important to consider the interdependencies among network components to minimize recovery times. In this paper, we focus on post-disaster repair operations of multiple interdependent lifeline networks, which involve functional dependencies. We assume that each network component, whether damaged or not, becomes nonfunctional if it depends on another nonfunctional component, and it is recovered when all components that it depends on become functional. We introduce a post-disaster coordinated infrastructure repair routing problem, in which dedicated repair teams of each lifeline infrastructure travel through a road network to visit the sites with damaged network components. We present a mixed integer programming model that assigns repair teams to the sites and constructs routes for each team in order to minimize the sum of the recovery times for all network components. We develop a constructive heuristic and a simulated annealing algorithm to solve the proposed coordinated routing problem. We test the performance of the proposed solution algorithms on a set of instances that are developed based on two interdependent lifeline networks (e.g., power and gas). The computational results show that our heuristics can quickly find high-quality solutions. Our results also indicate that coordinating repair operations can significantly improve the overall recovery time of interdependent infrastructure networks.