Critical Infrastructure Resilience Assessment and Management

Dear Colleagues,

Society relies heavily on critical infrastructure (CI) systems to provide and maintain vital societal functions. A critical infrastructure (CI) is defined as an asset or a system that is essential for the maintenance of vital societal functions, health, safety, security, economic or social wellbeing of people, and the disruption or destruction of which would have a significant impact on society because of the failure to maintain those functions. CI is an integrated system of people, ecological context, and engineered systems. Traditionally, to ensure the delivery of such functions, the focus of designers and operators has been on the protection of infrastructure systems from adverse and extreme events. However, recent events such as COVID-19 have illustrated that it is very difficult, and sometime not possible, to protect such systems from all kinds of possible hazards.

Moreover, these events have shown that it is difficult to precisely predict the all-potential hazards and their potentially cascading and complex impacts. This makes available risk management practice insufficient for the protection of infrastructure systems on which society depends. Hence, there has been a shift from the protection of critical infrastructure to the resilience of critical infrastructure, increasing the focus on preparedness, response, and recovery. In other words, having a resilient infrastructure, with the ability to limit the consequences of an impact through timely and efficient recovery processes, will certainly benefit infrastructure operators and society as a whole.

Despite the growing number of studies on resilience in engineering systems, the methods for operationalizing resilience in CI have yet to be defined. Resilience management is an approach that focuses primarily on management of the expected performance of a system operating on different operational conditions. The aim is to increase the robustness and recoverability of system against external/internal shocks and stresses in the face of change and uncertainty. Therefore, to have an effective resilience management, an understanding of how to measure and assess resilience is required. Moreover, we need to know how infrastructure resilience can be degraded or improved ex and post-external/internal shocks. Hence, a diverse perspective including ecology, engineering, psychology, and policy, economics, and organizational sciences is needed to understand and operationalize resilience management of CI systems.

The objective of this Special Issue is to document research contributions in the field of CI resilience management and assessment to continue building a resilient infrastructure knowledge community. In particular, we look for interdisciplinary contributions to management of resilience in CI from engineering disciplines as well as disciplines such as management, sociology, ecology, political science, psychology, urban sciences, geography, and economics.

Prof. Dr. Abbas Barabadi
Guest Editor

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