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Achieving Resilience of Large-Scale Engineered Infrastructure Systems

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Resilient Structures and Infrastructure

Abstract

Large-scale, human-engineered systems provide goods and services, which are essential for our society and economy. Such “critical infrastructure systems”, notably the electric power grid, have grown, witnessed tighter integration and coupling and experienced major changes. Finally, they have turned into a network-of-networks, with digital monitoring and control systems as one of the main drivers. Understanding and analyzing their behavior, especially after disruptions, means dealing with a high degree of complexity and uncertainty as well as potential cascades and “tipping points”. Some claim to reduce complexity but it may even increase in view of current developments and transitions, e.g., to intermittent sources, smarter and more autonomous solutions, etc. in the energy sector. Although the traditional risk concept with prevention and mitigation (“hardening”) as main policy has proven it’s worth, some recent disasters have shown that it might be a brittle strategy and maintaining or re-gaining functionality following disruptions should become the new paradigm. This more comprehensive, termed “resilience”, approach calls for inclusion of all imaginable hazards and threats and strengthening absorptive, adaptive and restorative system capacities. Measures to engineer and operate resilient systems are evolving, some of them like allocation of buffers, redundancies/diversity and sufficient safety margins, counter current trends. Advanced methods are needed to analyze the behavior of single and interdependent complex critical infrastructures are to some extend available and have been applied on a case-by-case basis. However, methods and frameworks to quantify resilience are not sufficiently mature and need to be further developed urgently.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the engineering domain reliability deals with the ability of the system to perform required functions under stated conditions over a specified period of time.

  2. 2.

    see p. 162, formula 1 in (Nan et al. 2016).

  3. 3.

    Events are termed “major” as the outages (a) were not planned (at the date of occurrence) by the service provider, (b) affected at least 1,000 people and lasted at least one hour, and (c) must be at least 1,000,000 person-hours of disruption (visit [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_majorpower_outages]).

  4. 4.

    For example, the “Northeast blackout” on August 14, 2003 hit parts of the Northeastern (including NYC) and Midwestern USA and the Canadian province of Ontario when a manageable local blackout cascaded into a collapse of the entire power grid. 508 generating units at 265 power plants shut down, the total load dropped from 28,700 to 5,716. Telephone services generally remained operational, but the increased demand left many circuits overloaded. Cellular phone services were disrupted and a large number of factories closed. Water systems in several cities lost water pressure because pumps lacked power. Electrified railway services were interrupted, passenger screening at some airports ceased, leading to a closure of airports and flight cancellations, etc.

  5. 5.

    A phenomenon whereby larger entities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities such that the larger entities exhibit properties the smaller/simpler entities do not exhibit (www.wikipedia.org).

  6. 6.

    As an example, the Swiss high-voltage power transmission grid has been modeled by 587 technical and non-technical interacting agents.

  7. 7.

    A time-stepped model based on a two layer agent-based approach resulted in a cumulative frequency versus size of lost power; the curve changed its shape from exponential to power law for load levels exceeding 100% (Schläpfer et al. 2012).

  8. 8.

    A recent study, carried out within the project of three German academies on “Future Energy Systems”, proposed a package of measures to create a more resilient energy system, meaning that it is a socio-technical system, and addressed explicitly new stress and vulnerabilities caused by malicious attacks, natural hazards due to climate change, scarcity of raw material due to international political risks, and inadequate energy infrastructure due to wrong investment incentives (Leopoldina et al. 2017).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ETH Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Wolfgang Kröger

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  1. Wolfgang Kröger
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Correspondence to Wolfgang Kröger .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Civil and Surveying Engineering, Graduate University of Advanced Technology, Kerman, Iran

    Ehsan Noroozinejad Farsangi

  2. Department of Architecture and Architectural Engineering, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

    Izuru Takewaki

  3. Department of Civil Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Tony Y. Yang

  4. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl

  5. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Paolo Gardoni

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Kröger, W. (2019). Achieving Resilience of Large-Scale Engineered Infrastructure Systems. In: Noroozinejad Farsangi, E., Takewaki, I., Yang, T., Astaneh-Asl, A., Gardoni, P. (eds) Resilient Structures and Infrastructure. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7446-3_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7446-3_12

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