Guidelines for harmonized vulnerability and risk assessment for non-nuclear critical infrastructure

Loss assessment of critical infrastructures (CIs) subject to natural hazards is fundamental to stress tests. The systemic approach that lifelines require for performance modelling is an open research topic, given their logical and physical complexity. The Work Package 4 (WP4) of STREST focused on the guidelines for the vulnerability assessment of critical infrastructures categorized as: A Individual, single-site infrastructures with high risk and potential for high local impact and regional or global consequences; B Distributed and/or geographically-extended infrastructures with potentially high economic and environmental impact; C Distributed, multiple-site infrastructures with low individual impact but large collective impact or dependencies. This reference report documents and summarizes the results of STREST WP4 via a series of applications and procedures (mostly referring to the seismic hazard case because of the level of advancement of research with respect to other natural hazards). The main attempt was to treat different CIs in a homogeneous framework derived and adapted from the well-known performance-based earthquake engineering developed for individual structures. From this effort it may be concluded that it seems possible to apply a unique logical framework to different CIs exposed to different natural hazards; nevertheless the performance/loss models for the key vulnerable components of each of them are still mostly lacking.