Modern critical infrastructures are becoming increasingly “smarter” (e.g. cities). Making the infrastructures “smarter” usually means making them smarter in normal operation and use: more adaptive, more intelligent… But will these smart critical infrastructures (SCIs) behave equally “smartly” and be “smartly resilient” also when exposed to extreme threats, such as extreme weather disasters or terrorist attacks? If making existing infrastructure “smarter” is achieved by making it more complex, would it also make it more vulnerable? Would this affect resilience of an SCI as its ability to anticipate, prepare for, adapt and withstand, respond to, and recover? These are the main questions tackled by the SmartResilience project (EU-VRi 2017). A major project ambition is to enable and support end users (authorities, operators and owners of critical infrastructure) to better assess and improve resilience of SCIs.
This paper will present results from one of the activities in the project; the development of resilience indicators for SCIs using a top-down approach. The indicators may be used for assessing resilience level according to a scale approach covering all attributes of resilience for SCIs. The approach considers five phases (understand risks, anticipate/prepare, absorb/withstand, respond/recover, adapt/learn) and five dimensions (system/physical, information/data, organizational/business, societal/political, cognitive/decision-making). A set of candidate indicators is presented for various threats and SCIs. These indicators may be customized to a specific SCI or a given user, based on the needs and requirements for the user.
Designing useful indicators requires extensive end user involvement to integrate the indicators into existing organizational processes. Several interviews have been carried out to establish a better understanding of end users’ current and projected challenges, needs and requirements for assessing resilience of SCIs. The candidate indicators have been developed through literature reviews and workshops covering finance, energy, health care, transportation, industry, water, urban flood protection, and a city environment.
The SmartResilience project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation pro-gramme under grant agreement No 700621.