ANALYSING CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE FAILURE WITH A RESILIENCE INOPERABILITY INPUT–OUTPUT MODEL

Abstract

Over the past few years much effort has been made in modelling economic losses resulting from critical infrastructure failure. It has appeared that including resilience measures in the modelling approach, which may mute the losses considerably, is a challenging task. At the same time it is necessary because it prevents the modeller from generating overestimates. This study presents two directions to improve the modelling of (economic) resilience for which the state-of-the art with respect to dynamic inoperability input–output modelling is taken as a starting point. Firstly, the new model allows for a different recovery path than the traditionally assumed ‘concave up decreasing curve’ describes for a disrupted infrastructure or economic sector in the aftermath of a disaster. In this paper, we explain how the recovery path may depend on the type of disaster. Secondly, the model refines the aspect of ‘inventory’ as a resilience measure. Inventory is interpreted in a broad sense here: it can be any resilience measures which enable an infrastructure or economic sector to continue its supply despite being disrupted. The model is applied to both a simple two-sector illustrative example and a severe winter storm scenario in Europe using economic data from the World Input–Output Database to show its practical usefulness.