What is Resilience?

Professor Brian Collins CB, FREng

Professor of Engineering Policy, UCL

STEaPP, UCL

Agenda

• Resilience

• Resilient infrastructure

• High availability utility services that must be supplied

– Energy

– Transport– Transport

– Water

– Waste

– Information

• Resilience properties

• Adaptability

• Investment issues

• Provocation

Resilience• The power or ability to return to the original

form, position, function, capability

• Scope is

– Financial – paying bills, collecting payments, cash

– Service – interaction with clients and customers

– Human – pandemics, skills, expertise– Human – pandemics, skills, expertise

– Environmental – extreme weather, flood, earthquake

– Social – helping each other, language

– Functional – systems, data, connectivity

• Interactive and interdependent

Characteristics of UK Infrastructure that

are causing concern

• Major unregulated growth in interdependency

• Some population growth and radical change in the

nature of living and working in the last fifty years

• Most infrastructure provision has been privatised

and internationalisedand internationalised

• No central governance of infrastructure as a system

• Little investment in resilience to extreme events

• As yet little understanding of the impact of the need

for adaptation and investment in resilience

A simplified view of interdependence

Incident in East Barnet

Many residents in north London who had their gas cut off have also lost their electricity after heaters they were given overloaded supplies.About 750 homes in East Barnet are still without gas, three days after it was cut off.

And EDF energy said about 180 customers have been without electricity since 2030 GMT on Tuesday.

A spokeswoman for the National Grid said water from a burst main got into the gas pipes, cutting off the flow.

More than 3,000 cooking and heating appliances have been distributed to the affected households.households.

And about 150 gas engineers from across the country have gone to Barnet to attempt to get the homes reconnected by Christmas Day. They have already restored supplies to 980 properties.

An EDF Energy spokeswoman said: "Following damage to National Grid's gas mains a number of electric fires have been distributed to residents inEast Barnet who were left without heating.

"The significantly higher demand on the local electricity network has damaged some of EDF Energy's equipment and interrupted power supplies."

EDF is asking customers to use only essential electricity appliances and switch off any non-essential appliances as National Grid carries out its repairs.

It has also "reconfigured the electricity network to make it more robust to help with the extra demand placed on it by the significant increase in the use of electric heaters".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8431654.stm

UK 2007 floods

UK 2007 floods

The UK Government programme• Published a report by Council of Science and Technology – an

infrastructure fit for 21st century – June 2009• Recommendations accepted by government in December

2009, forming Infrastructure UK (IUK) in The Treasury as governance body and lead dept.

• IUK survived the election in May 2010, and the PM published the National Infrastructure Plan (NIP1) in December 2010.

• Engineering, Interdependency and Resilience an explicit • Engineering, Interdependency and Resilience an explicit activity which still continues.

• Further findings to be published in Summer 2011 with NIP2 published in November 2011, updated 2012, 2013 and will be in 2014

• Recommendations for research across all aspects being taken up slowly by all relevant RCs, Industry and Professional bodies.

• Resilience, Risk and Governance research now being explicitly funded

Systems engineering

• "Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems". [INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook]

• Systems Engineering is all about creating and sustaining successful, purposeful, systemssustaining successful, purposeful, systems

• Relates to the development and delivery of goods and services

• Delivers real benefits to the suppliers, customers, and society

• Works with all technical domains, and all business functions

Systems Thinking

• "Systems Thinking enables you to grasp and manage situations of complexity and uncertainty in which there are no simple answers. It’s a way of learning your way to effective action by looking at connected wholes rather than separate parts. It is sometimes called practical holism." [Open University definition]practical holism." [Open University definition]

• "Systems thinking is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns rather then static snapshots. It is a set of general principles spanning fields as diverse as physical and social sciences, engineering and management." [Peter Senge , The Fifth Discipline]

Innovation in Systems Thinking

in national infrastructure

• Integration of infrastructure and construction design– Innovation at the interface between disciplines and sectors

– Balancing costs and benefits, risks and uncertainties

• Human and environmental impact and value capture– Safety, behaviour, congestion, community– Safety, behaviour, congestion, community

– Noise, air quality, pollution, carbon

• Information integration– Data from all sources over a range of timescales

– Systemic models to enable predictions to support decision making through whole life cycle and throughout the supply network

Infrastructure Resilience Research

• What aspects of service and systems performance need to be resilient; how much resilience is needed and is affordable

• How should resilience and risk be valued• How should resilience and risk be valued

– Monetised – financial capital

– Socialised - social capital

– Politicised – political capital

• How does it get maintained and tested

• Where is the data and is it open source

Some further research opportunities

• Use new systems thinking approaches to the evaluation of integrated infrastructure investment and governance.

• Examine different governance models for their degree of integration and what aspects of their degree of integration and what aspects of their degree of integration have a significant contribution to the delivery of benefits and mitigation of risks

• Identify key factors needed in a managed change programme to improve outcomes by better integration governance where appropriate

Commentary

• Inter-sectoral interdependency and resilience is poorly understood from a system viewpoint

• Rate of impact is different in different sectors, so temporal aspects are equally unknown

• Case studies of risk and resilience are vital• Case studies of risk and resilience are vital

• Individual and collective social behaviour under stress is important, and poorly understood

• Research is underway in UK on all these aspects

Thank you