The Resilience of Critical Infrastructure Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Risk management is a fundamental approach to improving critical infrastructure systems’ safety against disruptive events. This approach focuses on designing robust critical infrastructure systems (CISs) that could resist disruptive events by minimizing the possible events’ probability and consequences using preventive and protective programs. However, recent disasters like COVID-19 have shown that most CISs cannot stand against all potential disruptions. Recently there is a transition from robust design to resilience design of CISs, increasing the focus on preparedness, response, and recovery. Resilient CISs withstand most of the internal and external shocks, and if they fail, they can bounce back to the operational phase as soon as possible using minimum resources. Moreover, in resilient CISs, early warning enables managers to get timely information about the proximity and development of distributions. An understanding of the concept of resilience, its influential factors, and available evaluation and analyzing tools are required to have effective resilience management. Moreover, it is important to highlight the current gaps. Technological resilience is a new concept associated with some ambiguity around its definition, its terms, and its applications. Hence, using the concept of resilience without understanding these variations may lead to ineffective pre- and post-disruption planning. A well-established systematic literature review can provide a deep understanding regarding the concept of resilience, its limitation, and applications. The aim of this paper is to conduct a systematic literature review to study the current research around technological CISs’ resilience. In the review, 192 primary studies published between 2003 and 2020 are reviewed. Based on the results, the concept of resilience has gradually found its place among researchers since 2003, and the number of related studies has grown significantly. It emerges from the review that a CIS can be considered as resilient if it has (i) the ability to imagine what to expect, (ii) the ability to protect and resist a disruption, (iii) the ability to absorb the adverse effects of disruption, (iv) the ability to adapt to new conditions and changes caused by disruption, and (v) the ability to recover the CIS’s normal performance level after a disruption. It was shown that robustness is the most frequent resilience contributing factor among the reviewed primary studies. Resilience analysis approaches can be classified into four main groups: empirical, simulation, index-based, and qualitative approaches. Simulation approaches, as dominant models, mostly study real case studies, while empirical methods, specifically those that are deterministic, are built based on many assumptions that are difficult to justify in many cases.

Resilience analysis: A formulation to model risk factors on complex system resilience

“…Therefore, recently, systems managers have moved their attention from building a robust system by risk management to establish a resilient system using resilience management (Barabadi et al 2020). Robust systems experience sudden failure in case of disruption and lose their core value, while resilient systems absorb the adverse impacts, adapt to and recover their desired performance level after a disruption (Mottahedi et al 2021). The concept of resilience has spread from ecological systems into other domains (Holling 1973).…”

Resilience Assessment Frameworks of Critical Infrastructures: State-of-the-Art Review

“…For instance, Twumasi-Boakye and Sobanjo [51] reviewed the concept of resilience and its applications in various domains, with special emphasis in transport infrastructure. Mot-tahedi et al [52] conducted a systematic review, presented definitions of resilience in the discipline of CIs, identified 20 factors contributing to CIs resilience, and grouped and discussed resilience analysis approaches. Hosseini et al [53] summarized several definitions of resilience in different domains and focused on qualitative and quantitative assessment approaches and their subcategories.…”

Evaluation of sewer network resilience index under the perspective of ground collapse prevention

“…The risk management model focuses on the design of robust critical infrastructure, and minimizes the probability of risk events and their consequences through a series of preventive and protective measures. However, most critical infrastructures cannot withstand all potential disruptive events (Mottahedi et al 2021). On September 25, 2015, 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were formally adopted at the 70th United Nations Sustainable Development Summit.…”