SmartResilience Smart Resilience Indicators for Smart Critical Infrastructures

The SmartResilience H2020 project, coordinated by EU-VRi, has finished and its main results are released.

SmartResilience in a nutshell

Modern critical infrastructures are becoming increasingly smarter (e.g. the smart cities). Making the infrastructures smarter usually means making them smarter in the normal operation and use: more adaptive, more intelligent etc. But will these smart critical infrastructures (SCIs) behave 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? What are the resilience indicators (RIs) which one has to look at?
These are the main questions tackled by the SmartResilience project.
The project answered the above questions in several steps: (1) By identifying existing indicators suitable for assessing resilience of SCIs, (2) By identifying new smart resilience indicators including those from Big Data, (3) By developing, a new advanced resilience assessment methodology based on smart RIs and the resilience indicators cube, including the resilience matrix, (4) By developing the interactive SCI Dashboard tool, and (5) By applying the methodology/tools in 8 case studies, integrated under one virtual, smart-city-like, European case study. The SCIs considered (in 8 European countries!) deal with energy, transportation, health, and water.
Responding to EC Call H2020-DRS-2014-2015: Disaster Resilience: Safeguarding and securing society, including adapting to climate change, the project produced a complete resilience assessment methodology with several accompanying tools, notably the ResilienceTool which supports all of the developed methodology’s features. The methodology and its tools’ good reception made it clear to the consortium that the tool should and could be developed further which actually drove it from the promised RTL4 level (validation in lab) to a fully operational tool at TRL7 (operational prototype) with several real-world cases already implemented within.
Additionally, later in the project, the consortium identified an opportunity to drive the project’s results’ dissemination further and created the new work package (WP9): Ensuring uptake and sustainability of project results which would form the basis for the development of the European Risk and Resilience Assessment agency (ERRA) and that will see the embedding of the project’s results in the new ISO standard 31050: Guidance for managing emerging risks to enhance resilience.
For more information regarding the ResilienceTool, a full user guide is publically available as deliverable D3.7: “The ResilienceTool” of the SmartResilience project on the SmartResilience project’s website.

Main results

The European project SmartResilience has yielded five major break-through results:

1.    Method: An innovative state-of-the art concept enabling quantitative assessment of resilience. The concept aims combines the advantages of approaches oriented towards the easy-to-understand communication of the assessments results (such as “resilience very high” or “resilience level red”) with the advantages of the in-depth assessment approaches, providing many, but often difficult to understand results (e.g. detailed textual reports from complex resilience exercises). This main elements of the indicator-based concept are the “resilience cube” at the top, and the assessment methodology allowing to (a) assess resilience in a given moment in time and monitor it over the time, (b) analyze it during a particular adverse effect scenario, (c) benchmark it, (d) stress-test it, (e) analyze it in a system of multiple infrastructures and, last but not least, (f) optimize it a transparent and intuitive way. The concept is public, presented in publications and presentation and is being summarized in a book under preparation with the publisher (Springer).