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The work proposes a technique to improve the infrastructure and energy resilience of new developments during the planning stage. Several resilience-related parameters are developed in this paper that can be used to quantify resilience. To apply these parameters, the work assumes various energy outage scenarios varying from less than 24 h to 3 weeks. During these scenarios, a neighborhood population can be relocated to several public buildings promoting better utilization of onsite energy resources. The technique is applied to four representative neighborhoods encompassing various sustainability measures including clean energy. Further, this paper demonstrates an urban scale improvement technique for greater energy and infrastructure resilience. The results indicate a significant improvement in infrastructure resilience by relocating public shelter buildings on the main street intersections so that these can be easily accessible during energy outages or disaster events. Energy resilience can be achieved by the appropriate design of onsite energy resources to eliminate vulnerabilities. For instance, 8.8% to 15.4% of additional land for solar thermal collectors can eliminate thermal energy vulnerabilities. When surplus generation from onsite resources is twice or more as compared to demand during their unavailability, the electrical vulnerability can be eliminated by employing suitable battery banks in various buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extreme weather events can cause significant damage to power distribution network infrastructure, often resulting in power outages. Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) are faced with the challenging task of responding to these outages in real time while maintaining a resilient grid. Our paper presents an innovative approach to alert operators about the potential risk associated with upcoming extreme weather through a normalized fragility curve. The uniqueness of the curve is the ability to capture regional differences across a DNO's territory while presenting operators with a means of setting unified risk thresholds. This can support a proactive response and allow the staging of necessary resources to minimize the threat posed by such events. Our approach captures the changes in failure probability associated with differing wind regimes and demonstrates the benefit of sub‐regional meteorological information. The proposed approach is demonstrated for wind events using 20 years of historical fault records from a DNO in the United Kingdom (UK). While its efficacy is demonstrated for windstorms in the UK, the approach could be applied globally to develop normalized fragility curves for other types of seasonal extreme weather events such as snowstorms, hurricanes, or linked hazards such as wildfires. The approach can also facilitate an understanding of how infrastructure may operate under future climate conditions, supporting proactive adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural hazards such as windstorms, earthquakes, and floods cause damage and failure to both structural and non-structural elements, significantly impacting the functional integrity and overall performance of the building systems. The economic loss due to such events and the often tortuous path to recovery call for revisiting engineering approaches to resilience assessment through developing simulation methods that provide a balance between fidelity and efficiency, particularly if the post-event assessment is to be performed at a large scale, e.g., the scale of a community. In this paper, we develop a discrete simulation framework for modeling the response of structures as a middle-ground solution between overly simplistic multi-degree-of-freedom models on the one hand and intricate FE models on the other. The framework draws upon the Potential-of-Mean-Force (PMF) approach to Lattice Element Method (LEM) where the main idea is to discretize the system into a set of particles that interact with each other through prescribed interaction potentials. These potentials are calibrated beforehand at member scale, for different structural and non-structural components. Here we focus on providing the main elements and the steps necessary for adaptation to modeling structural components in linear regime and leave the extension to nonlinear regime and the modeling of damage for future developments. This includes calibration of the potentials for structural members of different types (1D vs. 2D) under different actions (axial, bending, in-plane and out-of-plane actions) through an energetic handshake between the lattice model and continuum theories, e.g., the Timoshenko beam theory and Kirchhoff–Love plate theory. We explore the utility of the proposed method through its application to simulation of a set of building systems with different levels of complexity and under various loading conditions. [Display omitted] • A simulation framework based on Potential of Mean Force (PMF) is proposed. • The PMF allows a formulation of Lattice Element Method (LEM) in an energetic setting. • The interaction potentials for the PMF LEM are calibrated based on energy equivalence arguments. • Calibrated potentials are proposed for both in-plane and out-of-plane actions. • The PMF LEM is validated via application to structural systems with different complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]