Time-Varying Assessment of Urban Flood Resilience considering Cascading Infrastructure Effects: Case Study of Neihu District, Taipei

Urban infrastructure is fundamental to the continuous functioning of urban systems. Nevertheless, the failure of a single facility can propagate through highly interconnected networks, triggering cascading effects that amplify disruptions and increase system-wide vulnerability. Despite these risks, existing studies primarily emphasize the direct exposure of individual assets, rarely incorporating cross-sectoral dependencies or indirect infrastructure failures into comprehensive assessments of urban flood resilience.

To address this gap, this study investigates urban flood resilience by explicitly accounting for the cascading effects of critical infrastructure failures. This study establishes a time-varying Flood Resilience Index (FRI) by integrating physical, socioeconomic, and infrastructure factors. To systematically quantify the interactions among four critical systems—water, electricity, transportation, and telecommunications—a network-based approach is employed. In this framework, infrastructure components are defined as nodes, while their functional dependencies are mapped as edges. This structure facilitates the simulation of cascading failure propagation and analyzes how these disruptions degrade overall urban resilience over time. By quantifying both direct physical damage and dependency-induced indirect failures, this study characterizes the dynamic response of the urban system during flood events.

The proposed framework provides a systematic approach for evaluating how infrastructure dependency risks impact urban flood resilience. By capturing the temporal evolution of cascading failures, the time-varying FRI supports the prioritization of resilience enhancement strategies. The findings offer actionable decision support for disaster planning, emergency response, and urban operation management.