Homeland security preparedness: Balancing protection with resilience in emergent systems

Abstract

The report of the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection [PCCIP, Executive Order 13010, The White House, Washington, DC, 1997] which was issued in October 1997 set in motion a revolutionary and expensive national homeland security initiative under the rubric of critical infrastructure protection. The PCCIP addressed a plethora of sources of risk to the nation's critical infrastructures, along with numerous risk management options. For simplicity, we partition solution possibilities into two major types: protecting system assets and adding resilience to systems. Much of government research efforts focus on analyzing component systems and their assets. Systems engineers are particularly interested in characteristics that emerge from the system design, which are affected by changes to component systems, but also by changes that reflect the way systems are constructed and integrated. Adding resilience to a system expands the focus beyond component systems to include a study of emergent, system-level attributes for homeland security consideration. Balancing protective and resilience actions through system-level analysis will provide a means to improve the overall efficiency of regional and national preparedness. This paper explores concepts of emergence, resilience, and preparedness as a foundation for establishing a framework to assess the balance between the two areas of infrastructure risk mitigation. We propose several considerations that must be included in a framework to assess protection

Static and dynamic resource allocation models for recovery of interdependent systems: application to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

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Definition of a framework to support strategic decisions to improve Enterprise Resilience

“…Paries (2006) and Haimes et al (2008) study the emergent properties of enterprise resilience and explain that it cannot be measured directly as an AS IS condition assessment, but it should be seen as a feature in the evolution of system dynamics. Rose and Liao (2005) describe enterprise resilience with two main characteristics: inherent and adaptive.…”

Preparedness Measures for Emergency and Disaster Response

“…(Rachmalia et al 2011) and "Strategic preparedness connotes a set of policies, plans, and supporting infrastructure that is implemented in advance of a natural or man-made disaster." (Haimes et al 2008). In the latter case however, the policies and plans will vary significantly if the disaster is flood or if it is a train bombing.…”