Infrastructure systems play a critical role in providing essential products and services for the functioning of modern society; however, they are vulnerable to disasters and their service disruptions can cause severe societal impacts. To protect infrastructure from disasters and reduce potential impacts, great achievements have been made in modeling interdependent infrastructure systems in past decades. In recent years, scholars have gradually shifted their research focus to understanding and modeling societal impacts of disruptions considering the fact that infrastructure systems are critical because of their role in societal functioning, especially under situations of modern societies. Exploring how infrastructure disruptions impair society to enhance resilient city has become a key field of study. By comprehensively reviewing relevant studies, this paper demonstrated the definition and types of societal impact of infrastructure disruptions, and summarized the modeling approaches into four types: extended infrastructure modeling approaches, empirical approaches, agent-based approaches, and big data-driven approaches. For each approach, this paper organized relevant literature in terms of modeling ideas, advantages, and disadvantages. Furthermore, the four approaches were compared according to several criteria, including the input data, types of societal impact, and application scope. Finally, this paper illustrated the challenges and future research directions in the field.

This paper investigates whether socioeconomic factors are important for the hurricane performance of the electric power system in Florida. The investigation is performed using the Random Forest classifier with Mean Decrease of Accuracy (MDA) for measuring the importance of a set of factors that include hazard intensity, time to recovery from maximum impact, and socioeconomic characteristics of the affected population. The data set (at county scale) for this study includes socioeconomic variables from the 5-year American Community Survey (ACS), as well as wind velocities, and outage data of five hurricanes including Alberto and Michael in 2018, Dorian in 2019, and Eta and Isaias in 2020. The study shows that socioeconomic variables are considerably important for the system performance model. This indicates that social disparities may exist in the occurrence of power outages, which directly impact the resilience of communities and thus require immediate attention.