Evaluation of resilience assessment methodologies

Abstract

There are a wide range of different frameworks and methodologies for analysing Critical Infrastructure (CI) resilience, covering organisational, technological and social resilience. However, there is a lack of a clear methodology combining these three resilience domains into one framework. The final goal of the ongoing EU-project IMPROVER, ‘Improved risk evaluation and implementation of resilience concepts to Critical Infrastructure,’ is to develop one single improved and easy-to-use critical infrastructure resilience analysis tool which will be applicable within all resilience domains and to all types of critical infrastructure. This article presents part of this work, in which IMPROVER comprehensively evaluated, by demonstration and comparison, a selection of existing resilience methodologies in order to integrate their best features into the new methodology. The selected methodologies were The Benchmark Resilience Tool (BRT) (Lee et al., 2013), Guidelines for Critical Infrastructures Resilience Evaluation (CIRE) (Bertocchi et al., 2016) and the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Index (CIRI). The latter was developed within the consortium (Pursiainen et al., 2017). The results show that it is hard to evaluate and compare the different methodologies considering that the methodologies are not aiming to achieve the same thing. However, this evaluation shows that all the methodologies have pros and cons, and that the IMPROVER project should aim at combining, in so far as is possible and commensurable, the identified pros while avoiding the identified cons into a Critical Infrastructure resilience assessment framework compatible with the current guidelines for risk assessment in the Member States.