No abstract

The water sector is, currently and for the foreseeable future, challenged by rising levels of uncertainty in demand and availability of water, in a context of aging infrastructure and limited investment. In order to support strategic planning, water companies need a way to assess how their system behaves when faced with a range of changing conditions (climatic trends, asset deterioration, behavioral patterns, etc.) as well as accidents/incidents and/or extreme events (wildcards). In this study, a resilience assessment methodology was demonstrated, with ‘stress tests’ alternative water system configurations (including systems designed with decentralized or distributed philosophies) under a range of scenarios and extreme events. A ‘resilience profile graph’ was developed to quantify the performance of each configuration. The methodology was applied to the real-world urban water system of Oasen, which supplies the eastern part of the Province of South Holland, where the current system configuration and two potential future configurations were tested (one decentralized and one distributed). We show how the concept of resilience, operationalized through this methodology, can assist long term decision making and support strategic infrastructure planning.

No abstract

Water distribution networks (WDNs) are critical infrastructure for the welfare of society. Due to their spatial extent and difficulties in deployment of security measures, they are vulnerable to threat scenarios that include the rising concern of cyber-physical attacks. To protect WDNs against different kinds of water contamination, it is customary to deploy water quality (WQ) monitoring sensors. Cyber-attacks on the monitoring system that employs WQ sensors combined with deliberate contamination events via backflow attacks can lead to severe disruptions to water delivery or even potentially fatal consequences for consumers. As such, the water sector is in immediate need of tools and methodologies that can support cyber-physical quality attack simulation and vulnerability assessment of the WQ monitoring system under such attacks. In this study we demonstrate a novel methodology to assess the resilience of placement schemes generated with the Threat Ensemble Vulnerability Assessment and Sensor Placement Optimization Tool (TEVA-SPOT) and evaluated under cyber-physical attacks simulated using the stress-testing platform RISKNOUGHT, using multidimensional metrics and resilience profile graphs. The results of this study show that some sensor designs are inherently more resilient than others, and this trait can be exploited in risk management practices.

No abstract