Integrating Risk and Resilience Approaches to Catastrophe Management in Engineering Systems

Abstract

Recent natural and man-made catastrophes, such as the Fukushima nuclear power plant, flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Haiti earthquake, and the mortgage derivatives crisis, have renewed interest in the concept of resilience, especially as it relates to complex systems vulnerable to multiple or cascading failures. Although the meaning of resilience is contested in different contexts, in general resilience is understood to mean the capacity to adapt to changing conditions without catastrophic loss of form or function. In the context of engineering systems, this has sometimes been interpreted as the probability that system conditions might exceed an irrevocable tipping point. However, we argue that this approach improperly conflates resilience and risk perspectives by expressing resilience exclusively in risk terms. In contrast, we describe resilience as an emergent property of what an engineering system does, rather than a static property the system has. Therefore, resilience cannot be measured at the systems scale solely from examination of component parts. Instead, resilience is better understood as the outcome of a recursive process that includes: sensing, anticipation, learning, and adaptation. In this approach, resilience analysis can be understood as differentiable from, but complementary to, risk analysis, with important implications for the adaptive management of complex, coupled engineering systems. Management of the 2011 flooding in the Mississippi River Basin is discussed as an example of the successes and challenges of resilience-based management of complex natural systems that have been extensively altered by engineered structures.

Assessing and Improving Operational Resilience of Critical Infrastructures and Other Systems

“…The resilience curves in Figure 2 are similar in concept to earlier notions of resilience in physical science that characterize the amount of elastic deformation in a solid material (Park et al [68]) or refer to resilience as the feature "that allows a system to return to its original form, position, or configuration after being bent, compressed or stretched" (Madni and Jackson [61], p. 185). In essence, a single curve in Figure 2 shows how well a particular design of the system performs in response to "being hit with different amounts of force.…”

“…For many systems, the consequence associated with a disruption depends not only on the initiating event but also on how the system responds to it. Indeed, system response is a common theme across many recent discussions of resilience in engineering systems (e.g., Hale and Heier [48], Woods [92], Haimes [46], Madni and Jackson [61], Vugrin et al [88], Park et al [68]). However, when writing a descriptive function g(w, x), this creates the additional challenge of specifying in advance the response to every possible disruption.…”

“…In the wake of these events, the concept of resilience is now frequently used to characterize how well these infrastructure systems, their operators, and their users react to and recover from disruptive events. However, there are many different facets of resilience (e.g., Zolli and Healy [96]), and much of the literature on infrastructure resilience is qualitative in nature and does not suggest how the resilience of real systems can be improved (e.g., Haimes et al [47], Madni and Jackson [61], Park et al [68]). This tutorial provides a guide to recent work that applies constrained optimization (combined with models of system function and management) to assess and improve the resilience of critical infrastructure systems to disruptive events.…”

How to Shape Climate Risk Policies After the Paris Agreement? The Importance of Perceptions as a Driver for Climate Risk Management

“…Integrating risk and resilience analyses is a complex task requiring collaboration among many partners . While risk and resilience approaches differ, they are, and need to be, complementary (Park et al, 2013). Case studies integrating risk and resilience approaches in engineering systems (cf Park et al, 2013), utilizing complex adaptive systems theory (cf Levin et al, 2013) or risk management (cf Convertino et al, 2013;Convertino & Valverde, 1982), risk governance and policy perspectives (cf Levin et al, 2013;Linkov et al, 2013) are addressing many of these complexities, and this is an area that should receive further attention.…”

How Civil Institutions Build Resilience: Organizational Practices Derived from Academic Literature and Case Studies

“…23 In contrast, the resilience of physical, engineered systems is most often an indication of an ability to withstand physical forces without deformation, malfunction, or breaking; is measured by hardness or robustness; and requires planning for the worst-case scenario, with the understanding that design for worst-case scenarios protects against lesser forces. 24 In behavioral science, where people are subject to stresses that require not just resistance but adaptation and response, resilience is a term often used to describe the capability of a system or organism to bounce back following adversity, in addition to the measurement of its capacity and time to recover. 25 Developing indicators for assessing resilience is challenged by this variability, but at the same time it is critical to incorporate each type of resilience into the assessment of the system as a whole.…”