Modern society needs resilience management going beyond conventional risk management, in order to address the behavior of large integrated systems and critical infrastructure, in particular, exposed to possible current and future threats. These are, for instance, terrorist attacks, cyber-attacks or extreme weather disrupting the operation of energy supply, water supply, transportation networks, health care, flood protection, financial sector and other critical infrastructures. The “resilience” of an infrastructure describes in these cases the ability of the infrastructure to successfully cope with these possible adverse scenarios/events, including the capacity to prepare, absorb, withstand, recover and adapt. SmartResilience project provides an innovative holistic methodology and the “ResilienceTool” (relying on resilience indicators) for assessing and managing resilience of critical infrastructures. The indicators, in turn, use both conventional and “big” data as the source. The methodology is based on the 55 resilience matrix and the aggregation of the issues and indicators in each cell of the matrix. The phase of “understanding risks”, including the emerging ones, provides the natural link to risk analysis and management. It includes also the modules for optimized decision-making and advanced reporting options compatible with the state-of-the-art approaches (e.g. FEMA). The approach is embedded into the new ISO 31050 standard (under development).

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Assess possible outcomes of an adverse event/scenario?

SmartResilience looks at the functionality of an infrastructure (e.g. does the energy plant produce electricity, can passengers be transported, etc.) by considering indicators showing the status of single “elements” of functionality of the infrastructure. The assessment is based on resilience indicators during the course of the adverse/disruptive event (“scenario time”). The result is a prediction of the functionality of the infrastructure after the event (e.g., “as before”, “better”, “worse” or “lost”).

STRESS-TESTING RESILIENCE:
Will the functionality remain in the prescribed limits?

The same type of the assessment can be done in order to check if the behavior of the infrastructure is within the prescribed limits, e.g. the loss of function smaller than the maximum allowed, e.g. following the European Nuclear Safety Regulators Group stress-test definition.

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E.g. How to get the best return-on-investment in resilience enhancement?

The SmartResilience tool provides the option to optimize the resilience decision-making: e.g. for the case when various “resilience improvement portfolios” (the optimization alternatives “OpAs” in the figure!), are considered. Different criteria can be taken into account (e.g. implementation time, cost, robustness improvement…), but the main one is the Resilience Level Improvement (RLI).

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Resilience analysis as a routine – from the simple checklists to familiar-format reports

Although a significant amount of high-level expertise, often by experts from different domains, is usually needed for resilience assessment of complex systems and infrastructures, there are tasks (parts of the overall analysis) requiring simplicity and straightforwardness. This applies in particular for the (a) inputs of values and (b) reporting the results.

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Risk and resilience “Assessment-as-a-Service”

The SmartResilience results and the ResilienceTool are envisaged to stay available, free of charge for the registered ERRA members, also after the project end. The main ERRA service (risk and resilience “Assessment-as-a-service”) will be performed by the Agency together with and subcontracting by Agency member organizations (organizational members AND individuals) which have the different competencies needed to meet the specific needs of specific industry branches or application areas (e.g. critical infrastructures or new technologies). In the most general terms, ERRA would contact and negotiate with the customers, engage the experts among the Agency members, process the contracts with the customer, and guarantee the quality of assessment provided by the Agency. Main Agency services would be the self-assessment, the audited self-assessment and the 3rd party audit, similarly to the services of GRI (www.globalreporting.org).

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