1. Introduction
Water systems play a double function as infrastructure systems. On one hand, they provide water services; on the other hand, they decrease risks to different services from natural hazards such as floods and droughts [
1]. Important water infrastructure systems such as stormwater, distribution, wastewater, drinking water line, transmission, collection, and treatment are crucial elements for any healthy community [
2].
Storm sewer drainage systems are essential in flooding prevention. They assist in diverting excess rain and groundwater, which runs off impervious surfaces such as roofs, parking lots, sidewalks, and paved streets into neighboring waterways in a system of drains and underground pipes. Storm sewer systems are varied in the concept of design, from simple residential drainage to complicated municipal drains [
3].
As an example, the City of Red Deer works and manages a storm infrastructure sprawling network constructed to guarantee any stormwater drainage made from catchment zones makes minimal trouble, danger, and harm to people, properties, and the environment [
4]. In the event of a storm, rain or snowmelt passes overland to storm drains, becoming stormwater which can gather and move pollutants, such as leaves, litter, pet waste, engine oil, detergents, fertilizers, and pesticides, into the waterways. Stormwater recieves minimal treatment before it joins rivers, and hence it is essential to prevent it from being polluted as it can negatively affect the rivers. In these cases, it is critical to manage the stormwater infrastructure system effectively. On the basis of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA report), the potential dangers and their consequences for consideration by pipeline administrators are mentioned in
Table 1.
In earthquakes, pipes and pipelines are affected in several well-documented ways. The most common are shear forces from fault movement and joint disconnection forces from ground dislocation and liquefaction. Ductile iron is the one pipe material listed in the ISO 16134 International Standard for Earthquake & Seismic Resilience because of its high tensile strength, joint strength, high deflection, and strain capacity [
4]. Pipeline failures during earthquakes are more frequent across-the-board than is commonly admitted and, in some cases, harshly handicaps emergency services [
5]. Earthquake damage can instantly cause a breach, moving the ground near the pipe, avoiding an instant fracture but increasing stress at specific points along the line. This means that a breach can happen days or even weeks after the earthquake, though all had seemed well [
6].
Physical and social systems’ resiliency are defined by Bruneau et al. [
7] and Cimellaro and Reinhorn [
8] with four “Rs”, which are robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, and rapidity. Robustness is a crucial component of resilience and refers to an infrastructure’s potential to manage stress without failing or losing essential functions. In other words, robustness can be a network’s ability to continue working after being subjected to external pressures or disruptions. Redundancy permits choices, judgments, and substitutions in a system to have different recovery choices if a disaster happens. Resourcefulness is the ability of a system to handle the consequences of the catastrophe, including mobilizing influential workers, operations, and required materials after a disaster, so that fast recovery can take place. Rapidity examines how fast the function of a network can be fixed after a hazard. Rapidity is essential for resilience [
9].
Based on the explanations mentioned, robustness is a subset of reliability. On the other hand, resourcefulness, rapidity, and redundancy are considered subsets of recovery.
Figure 1 shows an infrastructure’s lifecycle diagram before, during, and after a hazard. In other words, it represents the infrastructure’s resilience throughout its service life if it experiences any considerable failure or disaster. Over time, performance will continuously decline because of its functionality. When the system experiences a disaster, a sudden decline happens, known as “failure path” or “loss”. The failure path depends on the kind of catastrophe and the infrastructure system’s robustness. The recovery time and recovery path depend on the kind of infrastructure system and the availability of resources. The failure and recovery paths are uncertain [
10]. Cimellaro et al. [
11] also distinguished reliability and recovery as the two essential components of resilience. Therefore, reliability and recovery factors were considered in this study as the main resiliency factors.
After a disaster, water infrastructure systems that have a high level of resilience are expected to recover fast, while systems with low resilience would see a moderate restoration and recovery.
Table 2 presents the critical aspects of the water infrastructure resiliency so that the managers in the water system domain can be prepare effective plan for the recovery afterward [
2].
In most of the previous studies, the earthquake resilience framework for stormwater pipelines is not highlighted comprehensively. The majority of the earlier studies deal with water distribution systems but not for stormwater pipeline failure reasons and results. There were few analyses regarding reliability, recovery, and resiliency factors of water pipes because most of the previous studies focused on risks for the infrastructure, not resiliency. In addition, most of the methods that had used were mostly data sensitive.
Thus, the main research objective of this study is to develop a Stormwater pipe resilience analysis against earthquakes to improve the stormwater infrastructure system management. The overall objectives and contributions of this study are:
To evaluate recovery and reliability factors of stormwater pipe infrastructure system against earthquakes.
To create a stormwater pipeline resilience assessment model against earthquakes with limited information.
To quantify the resilience value by using the Best Worst method and Dempster–Shafer (D-S) theory.
In this study, the Best Worst Method (BWM) and Dempster–Shafer (D-S) methods were used for investigation for stormwater pipeline systems engineering with limited information. Moreover, the arc geographic information system (ArcGIS) was implemented for data processing and representation.
The rest of this study is organized into four sections. The studied literature is outlined in
Section 2.
Section 3 shows the research methods that have been used in this study. Data collection and processing are explained in
Section 4.
Section 5 shows the development of the integrated framework BWM and D-S theory.
Section 6 highlights the results and discussions while sensitivity analysis is presented in
Section 7. Finally, the research conclusions and limitations and suggested future research are discussed in
Section 8.
7. Sensitivity Analysis
To identify critical factors for the resiliency of the stormwater pipe system of the City of Regina and to quantitatively validate the presented model, the sensitivity analysis is performed. Sensitivity analysis gives essential knowledge about how sensitive the results of the designed model are to make minor the variation in the factors by thinking of them in an uncertain way [
42]. For sensitivity analysis of this research, the assumptions for reliability and recovery weights can be changed based on different scenarios in
Table 12.
The following subsections shows the detail of these nine assumptions. More assumptions were checked to validate the robustness of the proposed model, but were not included because of the space restriction. For instance, Assumption 1 was to consider reliability weight equal 0.1 and the recovery weight equal 0.9. The resiliency figure for all the pipes is shown in
Figure 15a. The average resiliency for the whole system became 0.392 in this case. Assumption 3 was to consider reliability weight equal to 0.3 and recovery weight equal to 0.7. The resiliency figure for all the pipes is illustrated in
Figure 15c. The average resiliency for the whole system became 0.404 in this case. Assumption 6 was to consider Reliability weight equal to 0.6 and recovery weight equal 0.4. The resiliency figure for all the pipes is shown in
Figure 15f for this assumption. The average resiliency for the whole system became 0.449 in this case. Assumption 9 was to consider reliability weight equal to 0.9 and recovery weight equal 0.1. The resiliency figure for all the pipes is shown in
Figure 15i for this assumption. The average resiliency for the whole system became 0.486 in this case.
Figure 16 shows the average resiliency value within the whole system for all the assumptions. As can be seen from
Figure 16, the higher the weight of reliability factors in the City of Regina’s stormwater pipe system, the more the resiliency it will be.
8. Conclusions, Limitations, and Future Research Direction
This study developed a framework for assessing the stormwater pipe resilience against earthquake hazards by integrating BWM and D-S theory. To demonstrate the applicability of the developed framework, data from a stormwater pipe system of the City of Regina, Canada were considered. Weights of the factors for stormwater pipe infrastructure resilience of the City of Regina were assessed using the BWM method. The result of this study highlighted that the degree of damage factor is the most important in comparison with other factors in finding the resiliency of the stormwater pipe system of the City of Regina. Next, the stormwater pipes’ resilience was determined. The calculated belief values of a stormwater pipe from the developed framework can show how much that stormwater pipe is potentially resilient against earthquake hazards in terms of poor, moderate, and excellent classifications for any given data. Sensitivity analysis is performed to investigate vulnerability and robustness in the results received from the integrated framework of BWM and D-S theory. It is shown that resiliency is truly sensitive at different weights allocated to resiliency and recovery factors.
The outcome of the analysis will help to determine the critical factors by assessing the resiliency of each of the pipes in the system, and will help the execution of a fast response to the essential factors by strengthening understanding of those factors. So, the stormwater pipe infrastructure will become more resilient. Therefore, the results of this study will assist the decision-makers in calculating stormwater pipe infrastructure resiliency effectively. The results and findings of this study can easily direct the administration to resist potential earthquake hazards and recover after such events.
As a limitation, the model’s effectiveness directly depends on the information and ideas provided by experts to find the weights of the recovery and reliability factors. Therefore, it is suggested to make a comprehensive network system with the cooperation of a group of experts. Another limitation is related to the dependency between factors in such models, but in D-S, it is not possible to consider complicated and reverse relationships simultaneously.
For future studies, the resilient stormwater pipe infrastructure framework can be expanded to other kinds of hazards such as droughts, climate changes, floods, landslides, and tsunami. In addition, a more extensive framework with consideration of robustness and vulnerability with more complicated dependences at the factor level can be created. In addition, to assess resiliency, other mathematical theories of uncertainty, such as rough sets theory and fuzzy sets theory, can be utilized. Moreover, a similar assessment can applied to provide the consequence model for various buried infrastructures such as oil and gas pipelines and drinkable water for future studies.