No abstract

After the adoption of the European Floods Directive in 2007, Preliminary Flood Risk Assessment (EPRI) was carried out in 2011 in France. It highlighted the protection of road infrastructures from flood hazards as an important part of the flood risks management. Assessing infrastructures' resilience by indicators helps urban stakeholders to better understand infrastructures facing flood risks. In order to achieve that, many French public and private institutions discuss relevant assessment indicators in wide varieties of documents, which can be defined as operational indicators. Some of these operational indicators are applied in practical local management, which we call practical indicators. This paper will present an approach to identify French practical and operational indicators of road infrastructures resilience to flood risks. We will also demonstrate how operational indictors can usefully serve as practical indicators in using Nantes Ring Road (NRR) network as the case study. Moreover, French multi-scales involved institutions (like national, regional, departmental and local) will be discussed to describe the national management structure.

Critical infrastructures serve human activities and play an essential role in societies. Infrastructural systems are not isolated but are interdependent with regard to social systems, including those of public health and economic and sustainable development. In recent years, both social and infrastructural systems have frequently been in dysfunction due to increasing natural or human-made disasters and due to the internal and external dependencies between system components. The interconnectedness between social-infrastructural systems (socio-economic systems and technical-infrastructural systems), implies that the damage to one single system can extend beyond its scope. For that reason, cascading dysfunction can occur and increase system vulnerability. This article aims to study the functional interdependencies between social-infrastructural systems and to propose a methodology to analyse and improve the resilience of these systems. Combining Actor Network Theory and the Functional Models approach, the social-infrastructural Interdependence Resilience (SIIR) framework was proposed. To assess the applicability of the approach, the framework was applied to study the interdependence of a social-infrastructural system in the Nantes Metropolis. The studied system was composed of the local Highway Infrastructure (an infrastructural system) and the Emergency Medical Service (a social system). The results (1) show the feasibility of SIIR for investigating the interdependencies of two urban systems, and (2) provide a guideline for decision-makers to improve the functional interdependencies of urban systems.