A framework for human-centered seismic resilience enhancement of water distribution networks

Seismic resilience analysis of water distribution systems has primarily centered on engineering metrics that evaluate hydraulic performance, while paying insufficient attention to human suffering caused by service interruptions. This paper develops a novel human-centered framework for explicitly quantifying and minimizing population suffering in seismic resilience enhancement. Within this framework, a new Suffering-Level Function (SLF) is proposed to quantify human distress levels. The framework integrates four interconnected modules: (1) a physics-based simulation including spatially correlated seismic hazard characterization, fragility-based pipe damage with explicit leakage modeling, pressure-driven demand hydraulics, and crew-constrained recovery simulation; (2) human-centered resilience quantification using the proposed SLF, which systematically captures population suffering through activity deprivation dynamics, tolerance level exceedance, and cumulative suffering escalation; (3) surrogate-assisted optimization using artificial neural networks for computationally efficient multi-objective optimization over large decision spaces; and (4) the development of human-centered resilience enhancement strategies to minimize population suffering under budget constraints. When applied to a real urban water distribution system under a multi-event seismic scenario ensemble, the proposed resilience enhancement strategies exhibit superior performance, effectively reducing cumulative suffering compared with traditional engineering-metric-driven strategies. The developed human-centered resilience enhancement framework incorporates human welfare into seismic resilience improvement, supporting decisions that explicitly prioritize population well-being in disaster risk reduction.