Articulating the Effects of Infrastructure Resourcing on Air Force Missions: Competing Approaches to Inform the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution System

Abstract

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Valuing Air Force Electric Power Resilience: A Framework for Mission-Level Investment Prioritization

“…These scenarios could lead to catastrophic failure of power systems inside and outside installation fence lines. However, as noted in earlier work of Narayanan et al (2017), what matters with a scenario is its net effect on power loss, power quality, and duration of the outage-regardless of the underlying cause. Hence, the approach taken in this framework remains applicable even under the most stressful scenarios.…”

“…A system may be subjected to any number of different types of disruption scenarios. No system can be robust across all imaginable scenarios (Narayanan et al, 2017). Similarly, we define robust resilience options as those that are effective in the face of a diverse set of disruption scenarios.…”

“…For example, a baseline understanding of the Air Force's vulnerabilities to catastrophic or long-duration outages is fundamental to the process of choosing desirable investments. An earlier PAF analysis considered the analytical problem of assessing vulnerability of individual Air Force installations to catastrophic power outages (Narayanan et al, 2017). The focus of that research was on systematic measurement of baseline conditions of vulnerability across a range of outage scenarios that typically are not considered in Air Force planning.…”

“…Scenarios should span a range of durations, from hours to months, and spatial scales, from installation-level to regional. To serve as examples, in previous work (Narayanan et al, 2017), the five scenarios summarized in Table 4.2 were developed to cover a wide range of possible outage conditions defined in part by their temporal and spatial scales, as shown in Figure 4.4. 5 The frequency of these or virtually any other scenarios is highly uncertain and, in many cases, unknowable, which is the primary reason why a formal probabilistic approach to risk assessment is neither appropriate nor feasible.…”

“…While it does not capture costs involved in implementing nonmateriel solutions, a potentially useful resource for comparing various system architectures is the MIT Lincoln Labs resilience framework for overhauls of system architectures (Judson et al, 2016). Finally, Appendix C of Narayanan et al (2017) provides some preliminary guidance on identifying appropriate power resilience options for different types of performance gaps. It is important to note that the analysis framework described in this chapter is designed for making decisions about different outage power resilience options and not for determining whether to pursue routine maintenance procedures.…”