Open Access

ARTICLE

Resilience-Oriented Flood Risk Assessment of Urban Distribution Systems in Coupled Electricity-Water Infrastructure

Jianxing Xiong¹, Weiting Li¹, Yongwu Mei¹, Zezhong Zhu¹, Yankun Hu¹, Xiaomei Wu², Wenyang Deng^2,*
1 Meizhou Power Supply Bureau of Guangdong Power Grid Corporation, Meizhou, China
2 School of Automation, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, China
* Corresponding Author: Wenyang Deng. Email:
(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Active System Support, Resilience, and Electricity Markets of Large-Scale Renewable Energy Systems)

Energy Engineering https://doi.org/10.32604/ee.2026.085297

Received 08 May 2026; Accepted 12 June 2026; Published online 09 July 2026

Abstract

Extreme weather events can severely compromise urban distribution systems and further disrupt essential public services through interdependent infrastructure dependencies. Under severe flooding events, substations and distribution facilities located in flood-prone areas may become unavailable due to inundation and protection-triggered outages. Such failures can disable electricity-dependent pumping stations and building-level secondary water supply facilities, thereby amplifying electrical disruptions into large-scale water service losses. To support resilience-oriented risk assessment of urban distribution systems, this paper proposes a flood risk assessment method that explicitly incorporates cascading water supply service disruptions in coupled electricity-water infrastructure. A hierarchical failure propagation model is first developed to describe the degradation process from distribution system outages to pumping station shutdowns, hydraulic head reduction, and end-user water supply insufficiency. To address incomplete hydraulic parameters and highly variable operating conditions in flood emergency scenarios, a multi-operating-condition transferable hydraulic state approximation method is further proposed, enabling efficient estimation of water supply states under different power outage scenarios with limited data. The proposed method is validated using a real urban case study. The results show that distribution nodes electrically coupled with pumping stations can significantly amplify urban service losses, especially under multi-node failure scenarios. Some critical node combinations lead to more than 34% reduction in urban water supply capacity, even when the water network itself is not directly damaged. By integrating electrical load loss, water service loss severity, and regional functional importance, the proposed framework identifies priority distribution nodes for differentiated protection and resilience enhancement under flood-induced high-impact disturbances. The findings provide an analytical basis for resilient operation and protection planning of interdependent urban electricity-water infrastructure.

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Keywords

Urban distribution system; resilience assessment; coupled electricity-water infrastructure; cascading service disruption; transferable hydraulic state approximation

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