The resilience of any system can be measured by two dimensions: robustness, the extent of system function that is maintained, and rapidity, the time required to return to full system operations and productivity. In essence, pre-disaster mitigation fosters robustness, and post-disaster adaptation fosters rapidity.
What happens when a business is disabled for a length of time? What are the impacts on its profitability, service delivery, and employees? What are the effects to the broader community? What are the key attributes that can help a business to bounce back or bounce forward from a disruption?
This paper describes an infrastructure risk analysis model, considering possible threats and potential impacts. Their model follows the commonly accepted risk assessment method of fault and event trees.
In this paper safety and security are brought together in a unifying risk and vulnerability framework that covers both accidental and malicious events.
Can public-private partnerships improve community resilience? In order to achieve community resilience public and private owners of critical infrastructures and key resources must work together, before, during and after a disaster.
This article presents a new conceptual approach and extended analytical tool for risks in critical infrastructures, and shows how external factors are a major contributor to the risk and interconnectedness of critical infrastructures.
The BBC reports that National Grid has issued its latest “balancing alert” on gas supplies. Unusually cold weather has hit big Norwegian gas field Ormen Lange and the Nyhamna gas processing centre, hitting North Sea gas flows from Norway at a time of increased consumption.
No grit means no cleared roads means no one able to get anywhere and a no-show of people everywhere. Employees not coming to work because of extreme weather will cost the UK £12,000,000,000,000.
Today’s paper describes how Finland views logistics and supply as important to national security and how the LOGHU project was created to develop a framework for identification and ranking of threats and corresponding countermeasures.
Today we are going back in time, to one of the seminal articles in road vulnerability. It is a conceptual paper that provides the basis for why road vulnerability needs to be a more important issue .
Beer distribution is a sector that will be highly affected by a supply chain disruption…in the UK. You could even say that beer distribution is part of the UK critical infrastructure.
This is the first paper that sparked my research interest in transportation vulnerability, and what would later become the focus area of my research: the cost of transportation vulnerability and the benefit of transportation reliability.
The chapter on transportation hazards in the Handbook of Transportation Engineering uses the risk definition by Kaplan and Garrick. It is is concise and to the point and boosts an impressive reference list for further in-depth study.
How are companies located in sparse transport networks affected by supply chain disruptions? This article develops a new framework for the categorization of supply chains, and introduces the notion of the constrained supply chain.
How many ways are there for defining vulnerability and criticality, really? Traditionally, risk matrixes have a likelihood/impact approach, but not always. Yesterday, I was examining a criticality/vulnerability matrix.
It is important to distinguish to between criticality and vulnerability when assessing the importance of the road and highway network. Collectively, these factors are an indication of the conditions, concerns, consequences, and capabilities that might cause an operating agency to label an asset “critical.”
The objective of the first project ‘Protection of Society’ (POS) or ‘Beskyttelse av Samfunnet’ (BAS, in Norwegian) was to describe how modern society will react to and can protect itself when facing modern warfare. In doing so, the report identified key components and functions that are essential to a modern society, and interdependencies between them.
New Zealand is probably not the fist country that comes to mind when thinking of state-of-the-art transportation lifeline engineering. Nonetheless, I think it is time to consider New Zealand as being one of the countries at the very forefront.
This is an excellent book. Despite being compiled from different contributions, the overall style is clear and concise, with objectives stated at the beginning of each chapter. Although at times heavily US and homeland security oriented, this book still manages to capture me, the international audience, to the full.
This book, Transportation Systems Security by by Allan McDougall and Robert Radvanovsky is not what I thought it would be, but it’s not the books fault, I have to admit that much. It’s the classic misunderstanding of the difference of the terms “safety” and “security”.
