Climate-change-informed resilience evolution of underground pipeline systems

Abstract

Global climate change is accelerating environmental shifts and intensifying extreme weather events, creating significant uncertainty for the reliability, safety, and continuity of underground pipeline systems. As climatic conditions evolve, traditional reliability-informed pipeline safety management strategies are limited to pre-failure prevention. This highlights the need for a lifecycle-based evolution of resilience in underground pipeline systems. To mitigate climate-related impacts, reliability assessments should therefore extend to encompass post-failure functionality and recovery. This work proposes a quantitative, lifecycle-based resilience assessment framework for underground pipelines subjected to climate change. The framework is fundamentally governed by climate-coupled probabilistic models that integrate a Kusuda-Achenbach heat-transfer model and an Arrhenius-based degradation mechanism to simulate the dynamic evolution of corrosion. Climate-driven vulnerability and recovery processes are incorporated to capture the evolution of system functionality. A case study involving climate change-induced extreme weather events (Flood) combined with typical failure mechanisms (Corrosion) illustrates the applicability and practical value of the proposed approach. The results show that the proposed approach can quantitatively characterize the degradation–recovery trajectory of pipeline systems under different climate scenarios, providing actionable insights for reliability-informed operation, maintenance prioritization, and resilience enhancement of critical infrastructure systems. This work contributes to the fields of reliability engineering and system safety by extending traditional failure-based assessments toward climate-adaptive, resilience-oriented decision support.