Do Resilience Metrics of Water Distribution Systems Really Assess Resilience? A Critical Review

Abstract: Having become vital to satisfying basic human needs, water distribution systems (WDSs) are considered critical infrastructure. They are vulnerable to critical events such as extreme weather, natural and man-made disasters, armed conflicts etc. To account for critical events in the context of design and operation of WDSs, the concept of resilience is frequently mentioned. How resilience of WDSs can be assessed using resilience metrics has been the subject of research of many publications. The aim of this paper is to inspect the alignment between a general understanding of resilience in WDSs and the metrics used for resilience assessment. A novel framework for categorising resilience metrics for WDSs is presented. A literature review of resilience metrics for WDSs is performed and the results are analysed using the framework designed. The results show that resilience metrics do not really assess resilience of the systems, but rather only specific functions and properties of systems which can make them resilient.