Initial Framework for Resilience Assessment

This report is targeting a framingof what SmartResilience actually wants to measure –“resilience”–,taking relevant research results and existing guidelinesand standardsinto account. This is especially challenging due to the vast variety of understandings, definitions, concepts, and applications of the term, including usages in different research areas or fields of application. In addition, for thereasonof this variety, a huge number of articlesand reportsdiscussing the term, its understandings and usages on a theoretical basis have been developed. Even several comprehensive reviews on the term, including qualitative and quantitative literature analyses as well as expert interviews, have already been conducted.

SmartResilience starts with an initial concept of (critical infrastructure) resilience, which was already defined in the proposal phase of the project. Up-to-date comprehensive reviews on definitions and concepts of resilience, including critical infrastructure resilience, have been available from recent results prepared in the framework of projects that answer to the call topic EU H2020 DRS-07-2014 “Crises and disaster resilience –operationalizing resilience concepts”. The resulting reportshave been reviewed, identifying results that seem useful for the SmartResilience resilience definition and concept. Reviewing approaches and identifying aspects that seem useful for SmartResilience from selected additionalsources (international and US organisations, industry, standards) complemented the basis for framing the (still initial) SmartResilience resilience definition and concept.

The initial definition has only slightly been changed, resulting in:

Resilience of an infrastructure is the ability to understand risks, anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to changing conditions and withstand, respond to, and recover rapidly from disruption.

However, the concept of resilience in a broader sense (including further framing questions such as resilience “of what” is in focus, what is the relation to vulnerability or risk management, how should the different levels and components of resilience be categorised) has been complemented, and slightly changed. Several aspects that were concluded based onthe reviews, are described in this report as issues to be considered and decided on when workingon the actual methodology (WP3), and/ or its application to specific SCI’s(WP2, WP5).This includes questions such asif a “transformative” character should be included as a main componentof resilience, or if “ability” and“capacity” should be distinguished, but also what to consider when identifyingrelevantissues for the resilience of specific SCI’s.

Asfurther instrument forcreating and maintaining a common understanding, a first version of a glossary of terms that are relevant for SmartResilience has been developed, is online accessible,and will be continuously updated throughout the project.