Quality function deployment-based framework for improving the resilience of critical infrastructure systems

Abstract

Critical infrastructure systems (CISs), increasingly suffering from various hazards in recent decades, are in urgent need of improving their resilience. So far few approaches for CISs resilience improvement have recognized that different resilience improvement efforts could have synergetic or conflicting correlations between them. There lack systemic approaches for transforming resilience improvement requirements into coordinated and implementable measures. To address this gap, the current study proposes a quality function deployment (QFD)-based framework for strengthening the resilience of CISs. The proposed framework involves different stages of the CISs lifecycle, and takes into consideration the correlations between resilience improvement efforts at these stages. It can transform resilience criteria into system properties, component characteristics, implementation processes and controlling factors successively, which is facilitated with a series of houses of quality (HoQs). Using a case study of electric power system, we demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed framework with detailed explanations of the design and implementation of the first HoQ. The results of the case study showed that the proposed framework could identify the trade-offs between resilience improvement efforts at different stages of the CISs lifecycle, and take into account their relationships with resilience criteria and the correlations among them to work out optimized solutions for improved CISs resilience.