Over the past few decades, the concept of resilience has emerged as an important consideration in the planning and management of water infrastructure systems. Accordingly, various resilience measures have been developed for the quantitative evaluation and decision-making of systems. There are, however, numerous considerations and no clear choice of which measure, if any, provides the most appropriate representation of resilience for a given application. This study provides a critical review of quantitative approaches to measure the resilience of water infrastructure systems, with a focus on water resources and distribution systems. A compilation of 11 criteria evaluating 21 selected resilience measures addressing major features of resilience is developed using the Axiomatic Design process. Existing gaps of resilience measures are identified based on the review criteria. The results show that resilience measures have generally paid less attention to cascading damage to interrelated systems, rapid identification of failure, physical damage of system components, and time variation of resilience. Concluding the paper, improvements to resilience measures are recommended. The findings contribute to our understanding of gaps and provide information to help further improve resilience measures of water infrastructure systems.

Agricultural land expansion is a solution to address global food security challenges in the context of climate change. However, the sustainability of expansion in arid countries is difficult because of scarce surface water resources, groundwater salinity, and the health of salt-affected soil. Developing expansion and sustainability plans for agriculture requires systems thinking, considering the complex feedback interactions between saline groundwater, salt-affected soil, plant growth, freshwater mixing with saline groundwater, irrigation systems, and the application of soil amendments to alleviate the salinity impacts. This study presents an extensive literature review on the effects of salinity on soil and plant health, the constraints and opportunities for sustainable agriculture in Egypt, and a systems thinking approach to the feedback interactions between saline water, salt-affected soil, and the application of soil amendments to achieve required crop yields. Insights and strategies are discussed, including a system-dynamics-based decision model, irrigation systems with diversified and decentralized water sources, urban water demand management, energy availability, smart irrigation systems, and active participation of stakeholders to achieve sustainable agriculture under climate and socioeconomic changes. The insights are expected to encourage stakeholders and academic communities in the water, agriculture, and related food security sectors to develop a quantitative and systematic decision-making framework for sustainable agriculture systems in arid regions.

Water cyber-physical systems (CPSs) have gained increasing interest to improve operational efficiency and reliability. However, due to growing exposure to cyber-physical attacks, cybersecurity and resilience against the attacks have become significant concerns. Efforts have been made to improve cybersecurity in water CPSs, but only a few attempts to investigate resilience against cyber-physical attacks. This study contributes to characterizing the resilience of a water CPS and investigating potential resilience strategies. An advanced resilience measure that integrates the withstanding, absorptive, adaptive, and restorative capabilities of a system is proposed and applied to the C-town water distribution network (WDN) for 15 failure set scenarios during a pressure-driven hydraulic simulation. The results identify the failure sets and unfavorable operational conditions that make the system more vulnerable to cyber-physical attacks and, in turn, produce low resilience and capabilities. Additionally, after the recovery of a disrupted component, adjustment of overall operational interactions across system components is found to be needed for the complete restoration of disrupted functionality. The findings provide insights into infrastructure investments with resilience strategies in cyber and physical water system domains.

Climate change and population growth have placed increasing stress on groundwater resources. Effective management of groundwater resources is crucial for promoting sustainable development, especially in areas heavily reliant on groundwater supply. However, sustainable groundwater management is more complex due to various factors affecting key drivers and their feedback interactions. In this regard, this study aims to examine the key driving forces and their interplay concerning fluctuations in groundwater levels within a study area in Illinois, United States, which heavily relies on groundwater for water supply. To achieve this objective, a system dynamics (SD) simulation model was developed, utilizing hydrology, climate, and urbanization data spanning from 2010 to 2020. Through calibration and validation of the SD model with historical data, the model demonstrated reliable simulation capabilities for groundwater levels. Additionally, sensitivity analysis and exploration of water resource scenarios were conducted to evaluate the critical factors influencing groundwater levels. Results revealed that population dynamics, agricultural land, and groundwater recharge were analyzed as key drivers influencing the change in groundwater level for the study area, among the climate and urbanization factors that had different contributions to the groundwater dynamics. A 10% increase in population, agricultural land, and groundwater recharge led to a decrease of approximately 5.5% and increases of 4.5% and 4.27% in groundwater levels, respectively. The results of the four-scenario analysis indicated that both climate change and urbanization exerted significant and adverse impacts on the groundwater level in the study area. These scenarios represented prominent and worst-case situations, highlighting the potential challenges and risks associated with the combination of these factors, which resulted in about a 77 mm decrease in groundwater levels by 2030. Overall, given limited data availability for SD model parameterization, the study emphasizes the need to consider the effects of both urbanization and climate change on groundwater supplies in decision-making for sustainable groundwater management, as well as the need for adequate management measures to maintain the long-term usage of groundwater resources.

This study introduces an approach using Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) to consider hydraulic resilience and economic consequence resilience of a water distribution system (WDS) to identify critical assets. ECLIPS (Economic Consequence Linked to Interruption in Providing Service), a way to represent loss of water provision as economic loss, is used to measure economic consequence following a reduction of WDS functionality. The approach is demonstrated using a hypothetical WDS and tested for pipe breakage and replacement scenarios using EPANET hydraulic simulations. First, the correlation between hydraulic resilience and economic consequence resilience was investigated to assess differences between two resilience measures for identifying pipe’s criticality for replacement. The results confirmed the two resilience measures exhibited differing responses (covariance = 0.2), suggesting that use of both would provide complementary insight. Results of the MPT analysis identified the benefits of balancing hydraulic and economic consequence resilience measures to yield lower risk. This study provides a practical approach to incorporate economic consequence into planning, design, and research applications identifying critical WDS assets.