The modern critical infrastructures (CIs) are becoming increasingly smarter (e.g. the smart cities, smart energy supply). Making the infrastructures smarter usually means making them smarter in the normal operation and use, more adaptive, more intelligent etc., so that they learn and react smartly. However, it has to be understood if this smartness also lead to an increase in resilience of CIs when exposed to threats, such as extreme weather disasters or, e.g., terrorist attacks, or new and emerging threats for instance cyber-attacks, which are mostly unknown with the advancements in new technologies space.
To understand this, the EU project SmartResilience is developing an indicators-based approach in following steps. (A) Definition of resilience in the context of smart critical infrastructures (SCIs). (B) Identification of their needs and challenges (C) Understanding smartness and it’s characteristics for SCIs (D) Identification of existing indicators suitable for assessing resilience of SCIs. (E) Identification of new “smart” resilience indicators (RIs) – including those derived from Big &open data. (F) Development of a new advanced resilience assessment methodology based on smart resilience indicators (“resilience indicators cube”, including the resilience matrix). (G) Development of an interactive “Resilience Dashboard” tool. (H) Application of the methodology/tools in six case studies, which are further integrated under a “virtual smart city” case study, involving energy, transportation, health, water and other infrastructures.
Furthermore, in this process it is important to understand what does “smartness” means? What are it’s characteristics? Are there any challenges related to “smartness” of new smart technologies? This presentation also provides a perspective on what characteristics could be considered while assessing the influence of smart new technologies on the resilience of critical infrastructure. This means, understanding what does “smartness” means in the context of critical infrastructure, and what are the respective challenges posed by these technologies used in SCIs. Further, these characteristics and challenges are used as a basis for surveying the project case studies to understand the particular “smartness” characteristics, smart systems and challenges they face while incorporating these technologies into the SCIs. Consequently, these characteristics and challenges inform the new methodology developed in the project to assess the resilience of the SCIs. At the end, a proposal is made on how the Emerging Risk Management Framework from CWA 16649, can be extended to manage these new smart technology related risks and improving the resilience of SCIs.