ABSTRACT
Critical infrastructure (such as electric power, water and wastewater, transportation and telecommunications) provide the conveyance of goods, services, and resources to communities, which are vital for economic activities. Buildings, bridges, and other structures and components of the infrastructure may experience natural and anthropogenic hazards, which may lead to a reduction or loss of functionality of physical infrastructure. Businesses may experience disruptions by either direct damage to the business properties, or reduction or loss of functionality of the supporting critical infrastructures. Business disruptions might lead to reduced or loss of production and sales, reduced income for shareholders and employees, as well as temporary or permanent closure. This chapter proposes a probabilistic procedure for modeling business interruption incorporating the dependency on physical infrastructure and social systems. The proposed procedure includes a reliability analysis to model the direct physical damage to the business properties and the impact to the network functionality and social systems, as well as a resilience analysis to model the recovery of structures, infrastructure, and communities needed to estimate the duration of business interruptions. The chapter illustrates the proposed procedure investigating the business interruption of a food retail store in Seaside, Oregon as a function of the reliability and resilience of the transportation network. The example includes several factors that can affect the business interruption such as the remaining available workforce and the supply-chain connectivity.
