Resilience and Situational Awareness in Critical Infrastructure Protection: An Indicator-Based Approach

The paper proposes a concept enabling quantitative assessment of resilience in critical entities developed in the European projects SmartResilience and InfraStress. The concept aims at combining simple communication-related advantages of simplified assessments results (such as “resilience very high” or “resilience very low”) with the advantages of the in-depth assessments (e.g. analysis of multiple sensor data). The paper describes the main elements of the innovative, indicator-based concept, starting with the “resilience cube” at the top, and continuing with the multi-level, hierarchical, indicator-based assessment methodology. The concept allows analyzing and assessing different aspects of practical resilience management. One can assess the resilience level of an entity at a given point in time, monitor their resilience level over time and benchmark it. One can also model and analyze the functionality of a system during a particular (threat) scenario, as well as stress-test it. The same methodology allows to optimize investment in improving resilience (e.g. in further training, in equipment, etc.), in a transparent and intuitive way. A resilience indicator database (over 4,000 indicators available) and a suite of tools (primarily developed within SmartResilience and InfraStress projects) and a repository of over 20 application cases and 300 scenarios, support application of the methodology. The concept has been discussed and agreed with over 50 different organizational stakeholders and is being embedded into the new ISO 31050 standard currently under development. Its “life-after-the-project” will be ensured by the dedicated “resilience rating initiative (ERRA)”. Although the concept and the tool in the form of the “ResilienceTool” were developed primarily for the resilience assessment of critical infrastructure (the “smart” ones in particular), they can be used for resilience assessment of other systems and through the extension of the, already initiated, implementation of AI techniques (machine learning) to make the ResilienceTool even more versatile and easier to use in the future