Linking resilience and robustness and uncovering their trade-offs in coupled infrastructure systems

Abstract

Abstract. Robustness and resilience are concepts in systems thinking that have grown in importance and popularity. For many complex social-ecological systems, however, robustness and resilience are difficult to quantify and the connections and trade-offs between them difficult to study. Most studies have either focused on qualitative approaches to discuss their connections or considered only one of them under particular classes of disturbances. In this study, we present an analytical framework to address the linkage between robustness and resilience more systematically. Our analysis is based on a stylized dynamical model that operationalizes a widely used conceptual framework for social-ecological systems. The model enables us to rigorously delineate the boundaries of conditions under which the coupled system can be sustained in a long run, define robustness and resilience related to these boundaries, and consequently investigate their connections. The results reveal the trade-offs between robustness and resilience. They also show how the nature of such trade-offs varies with the choice of certain policies (e.g., taxation and investment in public infrastructure), internal stresses, and uncertainty in social-ecological settings.

The emergence and resilience of self-organized governance in coupled infrastructure systems

“…With IHM maintained barely at or slightly below Im , the CIS is vulnerable to shocks to the infrastructure, e.g., natural disasters in the case of physical infrastructure or political turmoil in the case of governance infrastructure. Although yielding lowerπ, the self-organized governance can lead to outcomes in which infrastructure is maintained at I * HM significantly > Im (i.e., P * >P ), thereby providing a "resilience cushion" against infrastructure shocks (25). This highlights a fundamental Fig.…”

Sustainability Science: Toward a Synthesis

“…Research has shown a great variety of circumstances in which adaptations that mitigate immediate and local vulnerability do so by exporting it to other people, places, and times (175). The theory behind such apparent conservation of fragility is well established for linear control systems but still lacking for the nonlinear systems that characterize the Anthropocene (169,176). A growing number of case studies, however, convincingly demonstrate how interventions to control short-term variability and associated risks arising from nature-society interactions can initiate adaptation pathways that systematically reduce adaptive capacity over longer periods and larger areas (e.g., 177).…”

Resilience-performance trade-offs in managing social-ecological systems

“…Complicating the matter is the fact that promoting resilience can come at the expense of other desirable properties. Because of the existence of multiple thresholds and regime shifts, there is no perfect set of policies for governing SESs that maximizes resilience and performance simultaneously (Janssen and Anderies 2007, Ostrom et al 2007, Homayounfar et al 2018. Oftentimes, making a system secure against one source of disturbance increases vulnerability of the system against another (Janssen and Anderies 2007).…”

“…In particular, we developed Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equations for a simplified version of the CIS model with an emphasis on infrastructure. In previous works, infrastructure was one of the dynamical variables in a higher-dimensional dynamical system but, because of the model complexity, the metric of resilience had to be determined numerically (e.g., Yu et al 2015, Muneepeerakul and Anderies 2017, Homayounfar et al 2018, Muneepeerakul and Anderies 2020, making it not very amenable to certain types of analytic tools. Here, through the simplification of the dynamical system model-making infrastructure the main dynamic variable although still embedding the effects of other variables-and the analytical expression of the system resilience, we were able to rigorously apply dynamical programming tools, namely the HJB approach.…”