Tag Archives: critical infrastructure

Robust, Rapid, Resilient

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Revised on: 2015-09-27

The resilience of infrastructure systems 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. That is the theme in Fostering resilience to extreme events within infrastructure systems: Characterizing decision contexts for mitigation and adaptation, written by Tim McDaniels, Stephanie Chang, Joseph Mikawoz, Darren Cole, and Holly Longstaff. A very interesting paper, indeed, for more than one reason.

What influences the disruption profile?

In a previous post on transport network resilience by Mattson and Jenelius, I was struck by a figure they had taken from this paper. It was a disruption profile, used time and again by a number of researchers within resilience, vulnerability, reliability and related subjects.

In this particular paper the shape of the disruption profile is influenced by two variables: robustness and rapidity. Robustness, in turn, is influenced by mitigation, while adaptation influences rapidity. As a concept this makes sense.

More interesting than the above figure is the construct behind it, illustrated in the form of a flowchart, showing how the influence of mitigation and adaptation comes into play:

At the top of the figure is the socio-technical context. Here are the variables that affect the decisions as to how much pre-disaster mitigation that is required  (e.g. by law or based on prior experience), how much that is desired (e.g. risk acceptance) or how much that is economically viable (budgetary constraints).

Following the mitigation decision, at the next level, the system’s vulnerability is determined by another set of variables: the system’s technical resilience, and the organization’s organisational resilience and how they meet the next variable, which is a particular hazard.

Combined, technical and organisational resilience determine the immediate operational capacity following an event, depending on the hazard causing the event. That is the system’s robustness.

After the immediate operational capacity has been established, adaptation decisions must be made as to how to regain full operational recovery, the speed of which is a system’s rapidity in getting back to normal.

The evaluation of pre-disaster and post-disaster decisions and actions initiates a learning process that in turn leads to a new socio-technical context.

In essence, pre-disaster mitigation fosters robustness, and post-disaster adaptation fosters rapidity.

Conclusion

This paper clearly outlines a conceptual framework where resilience, a combination of both rapidity and robustness, is a result of ex-ante and ex-post decisions. Albeit resilience in common thinking more often than not is linked to how an organisation copes with an event ex-post, much of the groundwork for the coping process is laid ex-ante.

Reference

McDaniels, T., Chang, S., Cole, D., Mikawoz, J., Longstaff, H. (2008) Fostering resilience to extreme events within infrastructure systems: Characterizing decision contexts for mitigation and adaptation. Global Environmental Change 2 (18), 310–318

Author links

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In this particular paper

Critical Infrastructure and Resilience

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

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 flow-on effects to the broader community? What are the key attributes that can help a business to bounce back or bounce forward from a disruption? Those are the issues the Australian Resilience Expert Advisory Group REAG discusses in a position paper titled Organisational Resilience. I was alerted to this paper by a recent post on the blog of Ken Simpson, a resilience expert and blogger from Australia.  The paper details a set of core principles and resilience attributes that can be applied across a diverse range of critical infrastructure organisations, and although it is aimed at the individual business and its management, it is a paper that makes sense in a range of organizational settings.

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Infrastructure Vulnerability

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

This is a paper that has been collecting dust in my articles archive for quite a while, but it is indeed a paper that shouldn’t be hidden to the readers of my blog and it deserves to be promoted. The reason why I like it is because it adopts a holistic approach to model the interconnectedness and interdependencies of infrastructure systems.  Infrastructure Risk Analysis Model, written by Barry C Ezell, John V Farr and Ian Wiese and published in 2000 describes an infrastructure risk analysis model that in a straightforward engineering manner considers possible threats, potential impacts and their mitigation.

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Risk versus vulnerability

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Revised on: 2015-09-08

What is risk, and what is vulnerability? While connected, they are not the same, and perhaps, often confused? It is important to see the difference, and that is the starting point of Terje Aven’s 2007 article on A unified framework for risk and vulnerability analysis covering both safety and security. Risk is a more general concept, while vulnerability relates to a certain source. In this paper safety and security, normally based on different analysis approaches and using alternative building blocks, are brought together in a unifying risk and vulnerability framework that covers both accidental and malicious events.

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Community resilience in times of disaster

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Revised on: 2015-09-08

Can public-private partnerships improve community resilience? This question is posed in Leveraging public-private partnerships to improve community resilience in times of disaster, written in 2009 by Geoffrey Stewart, Ramesh Kolluru and Mark Smith, three researchers from the National Incident Management Systems and Advanced Technologies Institute (NIMSAT). The answer: 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.

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Risk Analysis of Critical Infrastructures

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

The vulnerability of critical infrastructures is a recurring theme on this blog, and today’s article has been on my mind for a while. What I like about Critical infrastructures at risk: A need for a new conceptual approach and extended analytical tool by Wolfgang Kröger is how it couples critical infrastructures, showing how one is dependent on the other, picking up a notion I described in an earlier post Are roads more important than computers?. The article also shows how external factors are a major contributor to the risk and interconnectedness of critical infrastructures.

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If the UK goes cold, blame me

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Still thinking about my recent post on the importance of security of supply, I first added salt and grit to the list of critical supplies for the UK. Now you can throw in gas, too. The BBC reports that National Grid has issued its latest “balancing alert” on gas supplies. These alerts are a signal to the market to increase gas supplies, and encourage electricity providers to use alternative fuels such as coal. It comes as low temperatures in the UK continued to drive demand, and as outages at the Norwegian gas facility Nyhamna continues. And what is my role here?

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No grit No roads No show?

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Today’s rather cryptic title reflects on the impacts of the current winter weather, and is a fitting follow-up to yesterday’s article on the security of supply.  The UK transportation systems seems to be particularly suffering under heavy loads of snow, and now they seem to be running out of salt and grit for their snowed-in roads. No grit means no cleared roads means no one able to get anywhere and a no-show of people everywhere.

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Security and continuity of supply

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

Aah…the intricacies of the English language. Not supply (chain) security, but the security of supply, as in the continuity of supply. Do you see the difference? This conference paper comes from three Finnish researchers, working with VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and was presented at ESREL 2007, a conference that will spark many posts on this blog. 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. While the paper clearly shows that the project is still a work in progress, much wisdom and food for thought can be drawn from it.

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Road Vulnerability

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Today we are going back in time, to one of the seminal articles in road vulnerability. Katja Berdica‘s 2002 article, An introduction to road vulnerability: what has been done, is done and should be done has laid the groundwork for many researchers, and has cited by not few authors since it was first published. It is a conceptual paper that provides the basis for why road vulnerability needs to be a more important issue than it usually is considered as. It is also the first paper to develop a framework for measuring road vulnerability.

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Critical: Beer Distribution

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

I’m not in the habit of making Friday a day for funny blog posts, but today’s article highlights a very interesting 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. At least, that’s the impression I have after reading McKinnon, Alan (2006). Life Without Trucks: The Impact of a Temporary Disruption of Road Freight Transport on a National Economy. Seriously, the article is about so much more. It shows how dependent our Just-In-Time-society has become on road transport, and what sectors that are most dependent on road transport. Transportation disruption should thus be part of any business continuity plan.

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Transportation Lifelines and Critical Infrastructure

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

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. It was published almost ten years ago, in 2001: Risk and Impact of Natural Hazards on a Road Network by Erica Dalziell and Alan Nicholson from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. As far as I am aware of, the Dalziell-Nicholson paper is one of the first attempts to calculate a cost benefit ratio for road closure versus mitigation investments, where the road is seen as a transportation lifeline, and thus a critical infrastructure for the communities that it links.

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Transportation Hazards

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

This is an updated and extended review of  the Handbook of Transportation Engineering by Myer Kutz (editor) which I have reviewed in a previous post 4 years ago:  Book Review: The Handbook of Tranportation Engineering. While rummaging through references for a journal article I came across an old copy of the chapter on Transportation Engineering in the above book and to my surprise I discovered a recent acquaintance I had forgotten that I already had met 4 years ago: The risk definition by Kaplan & Garrick (1981). For supply chain risk researchers, this risk definition has it all.

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Bad locations = bad logistics?

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Revised on: 2015-09-09

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. Within the constrained supply chain framework, a company can address its locational disadvantage by either redesigning the supply chain towards a better structure, in order to gain better location, or by redesigning the supply chain towards a better organization, in order to gain better preparedness.

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Resilience revisited

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Revised on: 2015-12-02

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. Today, I will take a closer look at a criticality/preparedness matrix with a third susceptibility dimension added to it, as presented in the New Zealand research project Resilent Organisations, a project that has given me plenty of food for thought for my own research in assessing and analyzing resilience.

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Highway Vulnerability and Criticality Assessment

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Revised on: 2015-09-26

Transportation vulnerability and resilience have been the focus of this blog for the past two days, first looking at Engineering Tranportation Lifelines and then Are roads more important than computers? Today I have a third article that relates to this subject: Assessing the vulnerability and criticality of the highway system. In 2002, AASHTO  (the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials) published a guideline on how to perform such an assessment, and I had almost forgotten about it, but it came back to me when I was researching my two previous posts. What makes this report worth posting about is the clear and distinct separation of the terms vulnerability and criticality.

 

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Are roads more important than computers?

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

Critical Infrastructure. Which is more important – or ‘critical’ – road networks or computers? What if one day you could no longer use your computer or the Internet for one month, but you could still go anywhere by car? Or what if one day you could no longer go anywhere by car for one month, but you still had your computer or the Internet up and running, which would be worse? I would rather live without computers than without roads…

 

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Engineering transportation lifelines

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Revised on: 2011-02-25

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. A 2008 research project, initiated by the New Zealand Transport Agency, provides a close look at how New Zealand practices  lifelines engineering. The report is well-written, to the point and provides insight sand recommendations that are applicable not only to New Zealand, but to road and transport authorities anywhere.

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Book Review: Transportation Security

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Revised on: 2011-06-13

Instead of Transportation Systems Security, which I reviewed in an earlier post, I should have settled for this book, I realize that now. Transportation Security by Clifford Bragdon has all the stuff that I was looking for in Transportation Systems Security. Where that book fails, this book succeeds. Why? Because this book, unlike  the other mentioned, gives a holistic view of our world’s transportation security processes and operations, in all modes. Although at times heavily US and homeland security oriented, this book still manages to capture me, the international audience, to the full. As editor, Clifford Bragdon has managed to put together an excellent book and I can only commend him on his achievement.

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Book Review: Transportation Systems Security

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Revised on: 2015-09-09

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”. In English, these terms are distinctively different, in my language, Norwegian, there is only one word, “sikkerhet”, and sometimes this can be very confusing. So, what I thought was “safety” (which was what I was looking for) was in fact “security” (which was what I was NOT looking for). Nonetheless, personal disappointments aside, this book has some valid and interesting points, primarily in the introductory and theoretical parts in the beginning.

The strong side

The best chapter of the book, as far as I am concerned, is chapter 2: The Transportation System Topography, building the theoretical base for most of the book. The authors demonstrate a solid knowledge and understanding and manage to convey it in a clear and precise manner.

The weak side

The front cover gives the impression that this book deals with all transportation modes, or at least with air, sea and rail. It does not. And it is not so hands-on as I thought it would be. At times it seems to be  just meandering along without getting anywhere. I can understand that there is a lot of ground to cover, but do you really have to cover it all?

Conclusion

It is not a NO-buy, but also not a YES-buy, rather a MAYBE-buy. If you’re looking for a book on transportation vulnerability or transportation risks, this is probably not the book for you. However, if you are a transportation systems manager who wants to secure your transportation system against malicious attacks, yes, this book could be very helpful, albeit it will probably not be the one you will be using as a reference more than a few times.

Reference

McDougall A., & Radvanovsky, R. (2008) Transportation Systems Security. Boca Raton: Taylor and Francis

Author links

amazon.com

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