Infrastructure Interdependency

Nowadays, communities and societies are increasingly dependent on infrastructure systems to provide essential services that enable economic prosperity and enhance the quality of life. These systems, at various levels, are interdependent to enhance their overall performance and reach the desired service levels. However, upon experiencing recent worldwide events such as COVID-19, the 2001 World Trade Center attack, the 1998 storm in Canada, the 2007 UK floods, and the 2011 Japan earthquake, it became apparent that interdependencies among infrastructure systems can upsurge the systems’ vulnerability, increase the potential for cascading failures and ripple effects on larger scales, and amplify initial failures into catastrophic proportions. This chapter will provide an overview of interdependency and its types, review of different studies in the field, and highlight the different modeling and simulation approaches.