No abstract

The rehabilitation of essential services infrastructure following hostilities, whether during a conflict or post-conflict, is a complex undertaking. This is made more complicated in protracted conflicts due to the continuing cycle of damage and expedient repair amid changing demands. The rehabilitation paradigm that was developed for the successful post-World War II rehabilitation of Germany and Japan has been less successful since. There are a myriad of conflicting interests that impede its application, yet the issue consistently comes down to a lack of systems-level understanding of the current situation on the ground and a lack of alignment between what is delivered and the actual local need. This article proposes a novel conceptual framework to address this, affording a greater “system of systems” understanding of the local essential services and how they can be restored to reflect the changed needs of the local population that has itself been changed by the conflict. The recommendations draw on heuristic practice and commercially available tools to provide a practicable approach to restoring infrastructure function in order to enable essential services that are resilient to temporary returns to violence and support the overall rehabilitation of the affected community.

There is a generic sequence to any incident that affects an organisation or operation. It is represented by the incident sequence. This incident sequence provides a common time-performance reference for a variety of continuity planning tools, irrespective of focus or priority. These range from business continuity planning through to disaster risk reduction. The incident sequence has been developed over the last 7 years into a resilience planning framework that relates the time-performance relationship of an incident to the component-enabling functions of the operation, resource demand at each phase of operation restoration after the incident and both risk criteria and risk context. The framework allows the user to determine simply financial and operational tolerances and performance thresholds for resilience planning.

No abstract

As society becomes increasingly networked, both physically and virtually, so do human operations. This change exposes a unique subset of challenges and risks associated with the intersection of systems and the potential for cascading failure. Yet existing risk and resilience dependency models fail to accommodate these complexities, potentially exposing the capabilities that infrastructure systems enable to catastrophic failure. This paper builds on operational resilience (OR) theory, to develop a theoretical framework for developing resilience in physical and virtual networks, the networked OR framework. The authors argue that risk tolerance and resilience is developed through the concept of a projected tableau which is well situated in the broader network context. An overview of resilience, networks and OR is provided, with an explanation of the networked OR concept, a revised framework for developing resilience in networks and application to an emergency services network.