Securing Community Resilience By Modern Infrastructure Design

Abstract eng:
In the National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review, the UK Government prioritised the need to improve security and resilience against attack, damage or destruction of infrastructure critical to keeping the country running. In response to this a guide (Keeping the Country Running: Natural Hazards & Infrastructure) was produced to focus on one of these threats, natural hazards. The purpose of the guide is outlined as “to encourage infrastructure owners and operators, emergency responders, industry groups, regulators, and government departments to work together to improve the resilience of critical infrastructure and essential services” [1]. “To share best practice and advice to enable organisations to continuously improve their infrastructure’s resilience to natural hazards.” And to “supplement existing guidance and fills gaps identified during the consultation on the Strategic Framework and Policy Statement in March 2010”. The guide suggests that resilience can be secured through a combination of four main elements; namely: resistance, reliability, redundancy, and response and recovery. In this paper we demonstrate how these components all contribute to achieving resilient communities. We analyse the resilience of a simple network which is augmented and subjected to events of different magnitudes to quantify the performance of the degraded systems. In our examples, the first network has a greater resistance (which incorporates reliability) to the disruption, whilst the second network has a greater redundancy and the third network has a superior response. We demonstrate that for each disruption the three networks have different resilience and that the most resilient network changes for each level of disruption. The examples presented in this paper illustrate a methodology for designing resilient critical infrastructure networks and demonstrate how all elements of resilience must be considered to achieve communities that can resist natural hazards.

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