IMPROVER D2.3 Evaluation of resilience concepts applied to criticalinfrastructure using existing methodologies

The current Deliverable of the IMPROVER H2020 project is the third and last in the project’s Work Package 2. While it draws heavily on previous work and deliverables, it shows the direction for the following workpackages, helping in their task to develop an approach for critical infrastructure (CI) resilience assessment which is applicable across Europe and to different infrastructure sectors as well as being compatible with the EU Risk Assessment guidelines. The current report combines the work done most notably in Task 2.4 and Task 2.5 as defined in the project’s work plan. These tasks aim to evaluate the contribution of individual resilience concepts to the resilience of critical infrastructure and to compare a number of existing methodologies for implementation of resilience concepts to critical infrastructure. In short, a set of existing, relevant, resilience analysis or assessment approaches were identified that. Based on well-defined criteria, three of the approaches were selected for more detailed comparison. In Chapter 1, these three approaches are concisely presented and reviewed. In Chapter 2, a set of several individual indicators that are widely used in resilience analysis are selected to be used as ‘test’ indicators to discuss their use vis-à-vis the selected three approaches. Chapter 3 presents four fictional scenarios, based on the projects living labs and representing different sectors of critical infrastructure in different countries. In Chapter 4, the use of the selected set of indicators is illustrated both vis-à-vis the three selected approaches and the four scenarios. Chapter 5 goes deeper in this discussion, and demonstrates how each of the approaches could be used against the four scenarios. Finally, in Chapter 6 the three critical infrastructure resilience analysis or assessment approaches are evaluated and their relative performance compared, identifying their pros and cons based on the author’s experiences from using the methodologies for the illustrations and demonstration. A more detailed, qualitative, comparison of the functioning of the three methodologies against the chosen criteria is also given. The feedback from illustrations and demonstrations of the three selected methodologies shows that all approaches have pros and cons. Moreover, there seems not to be any strict objective way to evaluate the approaches, but much depends on what one wants to do with a resilience analysis or assessment approach, and how much one is ready put effort and time to it, and who is doing it. These notions lead to the conclusion that, first, in the subsequent phases the IMPROVER project should aim at combining – in so far it is possible and commensurable – the identified/perceived pros while avoiding the identified/perceived cons. Second, the IMPROVER project should aim at developing a CI resilience assessment approach which can utilise the strengths of the analysis methods shown taking into account the idiosyncrasies of different type of CI and its operators. Such an assessment approach should take the form of a framework that combines a resilience analysis and a resilience evaluation methodology and is compatible with the EU Risk Assessment Guidelines