Novel techniques and approaches for risk based application of resilience concepts to critical infrastructure: an introduction to the IMPROVER project

Large scale crises are affecting critical infrastructures with a growing frequency. This is a result of both basic exposure and dependencies between infrastructures. Because of prohibitive costs, the paradigm of protection against extreme events is expanding and now also encompasses the paradigm of resilience. In addition to strengthening and securing systems; system design objectives are now being set, and response planning is being carried out, to facilitate a fast recovery of infrastructure following a large scale incident. The IMPROVER project is funded under the Horizon 2020 Secure Societies work program and aims to improve European critical infrastructure resilience to crises and disasters through the implementation of combinations of societal, organisational and technological resilience concepts to real life examples of pan-European significance, including cross-border examples.The project comprises three phases: an international survey to identify methods for implementing resilience concepts to critical infrastructure; an evaluation of these methods; and the further development of promising methods for application to European critical infrastructure. At the time of writing, the project is approaching the end of the first stage and looking towards the challenges of the second and third stages. This paper provides a brief discussion of some of the novel methods which we are employing in order to achieve the projects objectives and overcome some of the challenges inherent in the field. These methods include crowdsourcing as a source of information and to promote engagement of the population during recovery; as well as structured expert elicitation of expert judgement for hazard identification and ranking and fragility curve definition. These are combined with more traditional systems analysis and engineering analysis techniques to develop a toolkit to evaluate and promote the resilience of critical infrastructure. Within the project these will be exemplified by application to four living labs which represent critical infrastructure of pan-European significance