Defining Resilience, Robustness, and Vulnerability Metrics to Guide Facilities and Infrastructure Decision Making for the United States Air Force

Tyndall AFB was nearly destroyed after a category five hurricane named Michael tore through the Florida panhandle in 2018. A Program Management Office was stood up to coordinate, plan, and carry out the rebuild efforts of Tyndall AFB. The office’s primary responsibility is “building a base capable of supporting a 21st-century mission while also focusing on structural resiliency and efficiency” (Laidlaw 2019). Despite the requirement to build a resilient infrastructure portfolio, the United States Air Force has yet to fully quantify and qualify measures of resilience, including robustness and vulnerability, in the context of their current built infrastructure portfolio. This research defines resilience, robustness, and vulnerability in the context of built infrastructure and proposes an easily accessible taxonomy of metrics to quantify each of these terms. A systematic review of literature explored the public sector’s use of resilience, robustness, and vulnerability metrics. Key takeaways include identifying required data inputs for executing the metrics, a generalization of the outputs of each metric, and potential ways for the USAF to leverage each metric with existing SMS data. The resultant metrics identified are then categorized based on the level of analysis used to execute them (campus level, system level, component level metrics). Future endeavors include down-selecting metrics to those most readily implementable by USAF engineers