Sustainability, robustness, and resilience metrics for water and other infrastructure systems

Abstract Metrics representing water resources security (Sustainability, Robustness, Resilience – SRR) were adopted from reliability engineering to quantify stress on water systems in both the demand and supply sectors. The metrics were calculated for Prescott Valley, AZ and a hypothetical water system to illustrate a method of application, the breadth of situations in which they are useful and their response to water management and system design decisions. The sensitivities of the proposed metrics to (i) variation in supply and demand functions, (ii) surface reservoir storage capacity, and (iii) reclaimed water use were investigated. Strengths and weaknesses of the proposed metrics are discussed. The water security metrics can contribute to the multi-objective evaluation of water resources planning alternatives. The fundamental nature of these metrics taken from broadly applicable field of reliability engineering suggests that they can be generally applied to single and joint infrastructure SRR assessment, planning, and design.