Engineering Resilience in Critical Infrastructures

Abstract

This short paper is a result of several intense days of discussion following a talk at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop “Resilience-Based Approaches to Critical Infrastructure Safeguarding”, which took place in Ponta Delgada, Portugal on June 26–29, 2016. This piece elaborates on the definition of resilience, the need for resilience in critical interdependent infrastructures, and on resilience quantification. An integrated metric for measuring resilience is discussed and strategies to build resilience in critical infrastructures are reviewed. These strategies are presented in the context of the research work carried out at the Reliability and Risk Engineering Laboratory, ETH Zurich, namely, (a) planning ahead for resilience during the design phase, (b) carrying out effective system restoration, (c) quickly recovering from the minimum performance level, (d) self-healing, adaptation and control, and (e) exploiting interdependencies among infrastructures. This paper embraces a fundamentally engineering perspective and is by no means an exhaustive examination of the matter. It particularly focusing on technical aspects and does not touch upon the rich work on community resilience and the possible measures to strengthen the response of communities to disasters.