A Decision Support System for mitigating the seismic risk of electric distribution networks: learnings from the Central Italy earthquake sequence 2016–2017

Electrical distribution networks (EDN) are still very vulnerable to natural hazards, including earthquakes. Tools and methods are needed to support and demonstrate the business case to invest in resilience when designing new networks or retrofitting existing ones. EISAC.it, the Italian node of EISAC, Europe Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Centre, is working towards that. In particular, the paper presents the on-going activities to support the vulnerability assessment and the estimation of earthquake-induced damages and impacts to EDNs via a web-GIS Decision Support System, named CIPCast DSS. Information available on the damage and impacts that the August 24th, 2016, “Amatrice” earthquake caused on the local EDN have been used to advance the taxonomy used to identify possible seismic vulnerable components of EDN and to show how the estimations of the earthquake-induced physical damages provided by CIPcast DSS are consistent with the observed ones. The possibility to define a DSS that can support reliable estimations of damages and impacts strongly rely on the availability of data and information, and therefore on the availability of EDN operators to provide them and to collaborate closely with researchers. This paper would like also to be a call for action towards that.