Old wine in new bottles? Understanding infrastructure resilience: Foundations, assessment, and limitations

Abstract

While the trend towards building resilience in infrastructure systems for disaster risk reduction is accelerating, the application of infrastructure resilience is largely conceptual or an embellishment to established modelling techniques. In response, this paper sets out the theoretical foundations of infrastructure resilience, which broadly applies across critical infrastructure networks. This is followed by reviewing system-based and network-based approaches to resilience assessment with a focus on transport infrastructure, where there is an emerging body of studies. It spotlights critical issues in conflating resilience with other concepts of infrastructure safety management or merely tagging resilience on established methods, indicating a phenomenon of “old wine in new bottles”. Also, oversimplifying disruption scenarios does not provide a sufficient basis for informed resilience planning. This paper reminds readers to look beyond resilience as a mere buzzword and offers guidance on how to do so by recognising the theoretical and methodological cornerstones of infrastructure resilience.