Resilience estimation of critical infrastructure systems: Application of expert judgment

Abstract

Resilience is an emerging concept whose application has increased significantly in managing engineering systems. In order to have an effective resilience management, first, an estimation of the system resilience should be undertaken. However, a lack of historical data and limited information are major challenges for system resilience estimation. The main reason is that most data collection systems are not designed for resilience assessment. Moreover, the available study dealing with resilience assessment have been used different indices to quantify the resilience of critical infrastructures including, robustness, recoverability, etc. These indices can be affected in a complex way by different factors such as operational conditions, protective practices, the recovery process, logistic process, etc. However, the available resilience studies are not so detailed regarding identifying and quantifying these influencing factors. Therefore, this paper aims to develop and apply a practical methodology to estimate resilience based on the combination of expert judgment and fuzzy set theory. By adopting this methodology, factors influencing resilience can be modeled effectively. Finally, the application of the proposed methodology is illustrated for the main fan system of an underground coal mine.