Safe & SuRe
Steering Group Meeting
Maryam Imani
Associate Research Fellow
03 October 2013
1
Outline
WP2: Concepts & Terms
 Aim
 Resilience
A. Important leading questions
B. Types of Resilience
C. Characteristics and Properties of Resilience
D. Resilience Approach Framework
WP3: Threats & Impacts
 Aim
 Threats classification
 Impacts
2
Objective A: vision & Context
WP2: Concepts & Terms
3
 It is aimed in WP2 to…
Understand and more clearly define the concept of Resilience as a core characteristic of
the emerging paradigm developed in WP1.
Robustness
Vulnerability
Persistence
Flexibility
Sensitivity
Resistance
Impact
Reliability
Adaptability
Adaptive capacity
Efficiency
Transformation
Adaptation
Resilience
Mitigation
Sustainability
Stability
Redundancy
4
 Resilience
Resilience Approach
Resilience is a new key which conducts the efforts towards a less vulnerable system under the current
and future unpredicted/predicted adverse events.
Command-Control
To manage the system
To adapt with changes
A. Important leading questions
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
Resilience framework elements
What exhibits Resilience (Resilience of what)?
Resilience to what?
Required actions
Preserved qualities
5
a. Resilience Framework elements
Element 2: Quality of
Performance
Element 4: Event
Element 1: System
Element 5:
Required actions
QPmin
Element 3: Time
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b. What exhibits Resilience (Resilience of what)?
Many different kinds of things potentially can exhibit Resilience such as:

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System: general
Technical system: e.g. engineering system
Ecosystem
Organisation/Institution
Enterprise: e.g. socio-technical system, infrastructure system,…
Person
People + Environment
Network
….
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c. Resilience to what?
Inherent to the idea of Resilience, is the existence of EVENTS that pose a challenge to the on-going
well-being of the system.
 Terms used for these EVENTS (obtained from Literatures):
Event, Perturbation, Disturbance, Disruption, Shock, Loss, Crisis, Emergency situation,
Emergent event, Threat, Stressor, Anomaly, Change, Failure.
Resilience to Event, Resilience to threat, Resilience to Shock, Resilience to Change,
Resilience to Failure???…..
They are not fundamentally different.
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d. Required Actions (existing terminologies)
What do we expect from a Resilient System to react/behave?
Before the threat
During the threat
To predict/anticipate/foresight
/forecast in order to prevent
any undesirable impacts
After the threat
Short-term
Threat
To prepare/improve/update/
upgrade/adjust against
undesirable impacts
To prevent problem
becoming worse
To root out troubles
Long-term
To recover/restore/ bounceback/transform to a desirable
state
Adapt, prevent, resist/persist/counter/withstand/cope with, mitigate, adjust,
To
To avoid
/manage any other
To adapt
to changes
survive/endure,
sustain/maintain/retain,
absorb, respond, reorganize,
tolerate,
degrade,
survive/cope/maintainpotential dangers affecting the
restore/recover/bounce-back
from/return to equilibrium.
sustain
system
performance before the
To learn from threat
Threat
functioning/withstand/
resist
To respond quickly
and efficiently
To self-organise (if necessary)
Time
We expect from a Resilient System:
 To be able to anticipate the threat in order to prevent
 To be able to prepare against the threat
 To be able to avoid potential threats
before coming
Resilient
STSthreat
Before the
Threat
 To be able to resist at the time of the threat
 To respond quickly and efficiently at the time of the threat





At the time of
the
occurrence
After
the Threat
To
prevent
problem
worse after
the threat
Before
the
Threatbecoming During
the Threat
To adapt to changes after the threat
To recover/restore after the threat
To learn form the threat
After the
Threat
To self-organise after the threat
Anticipate
Prevent
Avoid
Resist
Respond
Prevent
Adapt
Recover
Learn
Self-Organise
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e. Preserved Qualities (in Resilience approach/in being Resilient)
 Function, structure, performance, state/regime, identity, feedbacks, objectives, operations,
processes, controls.
•
•
•
System properties must be preserved: function, structure;
System identities must be preserved: set of feedbacks, state or regime, set of controls, processes;
System must, preserve performance, continue to meet objectives, continue operating.
 Things that are allowed to change: Operating mode, internal configuration, sometimes internal
structure (self-organization)
•
•
To re-(self-)organize, reconfigure, transition to a new state;
To learn and to improve learning (people-intensive systems such as organizations, enterprises, and
socio-technical systems).
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B. Types of Resilience (Gunderson and Pritchard, 2002; Folke, 2006)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Engineering Resilience
Infrastructure Resilience
Ecological/Ecosystem Resilience
Social Resilience
Social-Ecological Resilience
Institutional Resilience
Socio-Technical/Technological Resilience
….
National Information Infrastructure Advisory
Council (NIAC) (2009) (2009):
•
•
Broad-based Resilience: social,
organisational, institutional,
economical…..
Infrastructure Resilience:
infrastructure systems, engineering
systems, functions…..
UWS is a Socio-Technical System (STS):
•
It consists of social and technical or technological systems designed to ensure that the two systems
jointly contribute to the (maybe best) possible human and organisational outcomes (Ing et al., 2012).
•
UWS can be a STS as it points to the interrelatedness of the Engineering systems
(i.e. UWS) and the society (i.e. human life)(Hamilton et al., 2009)
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Resilience Definitions (from Lit.)
In Cambridge Dictionary: Ability to quickly return to previous good condition
In Oxford Dictionary: Capacity to recover quickly from difficulties
Infrastructure resilience (NIAC, 2009):
Ability to reduce the magnitude and/or duration of disruptive events. The effectiveness of a resilient infrastructure
or enterprise depends upon its ability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to, and/or rapidly recover from a potentially
disruptive event.
Engineering Resilience (Madni & Scott, 2009) :
•
•
is concerned with building systems that are able to circumvent accidents through anticipation, survive
disruptions through recovery, and grow through adaptation.
resilience engineering calls for individuals and organizations to continually adjust/monitor their
behaviour/responses to changes in the real-world conditions in a safe, and risk-managed fashion.
Resilience (Hamilton, 2009):
Ability of a system to resist, absorb, recover from the impacts of external and internal, natural and man-made
shocks, overloads and disasters.
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C. Resilience Characteristics and Properties
Robustness
Vulnerability
Impact
Sensitivity
Adaptive capacity
Persistence
Flexibility
Resistance
Adaptability Reliability
Mitigation
Stability
Adaptation
Efficiency
Sustainability
Resilience Redundancy
Transformation
•
Characteristics: Robustness, Reliability, Adaptability (Adaptive Capacity), Vulnerability,…
•
Properties: Resistance, Persistence, Absorptive, Restorative, Flexibility, Redundancy,…..
D. How the Resilience approach framework should be?
 Resilience against crossing a performance threshold (Ecological Resilience);
(key properties: resilience, complexity, self-organisation and emergence)
 Resilience for post-disaster response and recovery after disturbances (Eng. Resilience);
(key properties: robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, rapidity)
 Resilience that related to adaptive capacity and management (Institutional/Organisational
Resilience) (key properties: ability to foresee and prevent adverse events, ability to response quickly
to adverse events, ability to recover from an adverse event).
(Wang & Blackmore, 2009)
Infrastructure resilience (NIAC, 2009)
Ability to reduce the magnitude and/or duration of disruptive events. The effectiveness of a resilient infrastructure
or enterprise depends upon its ability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to, and/or rapidly recover from a potentially
disruptive event.
Four features for Resilience
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System Response and Recovery Curve (Ouyang, 2012)
Resilience is the joint ability of infrastructure systems to resist (prevent and withstand) any possible
hazards, absorb the initial damage, and recover to normal operation.
Typical performance response curve of an infrastructure system following a disruptive event
1. First stage (0 -t0): Resistance capacity (index: hazard frequency, initial damage level)
2. Second stage (t0 – t1): Absorptive capacity (index: max impact level)
3. Third stage (t1 – tE): Restorative capacity (index: recovery time, recovery cost)
Note: Performance level can be measured by different metrics, amount of flow or services delivered, no. of
people served etc, depends on the WS sector)
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System Response and Recovery Curve
Quality of Performance
Normal Level
Robustness
Level of Service
Resistance
Absorptive
Restorative/Recovery
Resilience
QPmin
Time
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How do we think about Resilience Concept in Safe&SuRe?
Definition: Ability to reduce the magnitude and/or duration of disruptive threats. The
effectiveness of a resilient UWS depends upon its ability to anticipate, prevent, absorb,
adapt to, and/or rapidly recover from a potentially disruptive threat.
Sustainable
We should define the resilience concept in each water sector
(NIAC, 2009: Resilience concept/definition is sector specific).
Resilient
•
•
•
Resilience concept in WDS
Resilience concept in UDS
Resilience concept in UWS
Robust
Resilience can be a property of a system (emergent property),
can be a system characteristic or can be a goal of the system to reach.
Pyramid of Safe & SuRe UWS
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Objective A: vision & Context
WP3: Threats and impacts
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 WP3 is concerned with…
potential threats to the urban water system and mapping these through to potential
impacts.
Economical
Origin
Human-Related
External
Internal
Social
Environmental
Threats
Organisational
Cyber
Partly disruption
Potential to disrupt
Fully disruption
Accidental
Human-Made
Threats
Delibrate
Temporality of Change
Acute
System Operation
Chronic
Engineering
infrastructure
System Design (physical)
Multiple/ simultaneous
Occurrence
System communication
Single
routine/regular
Severity
emergency
Resilience to what?
disaster/irregular
Unpredicted/unexpected
Predictability
Predicted/expected
Resilience to Threat
Threats
Impacts
Vulnerability
Failure
Vulnerability
 Vulnerability can be broadly defined as the
“susceptibility to be harmed” (Smith et al., 2013, TRUST).
 It can be measured be (Adger, 2006):
• Exposure,
• Sensitivity,
• Adaptive Capacity.
(Allen Consulting, 2005)
Exposure: The anticipated frequency, magnitude, and duration of potentially harmful events is referred
to as exposure.
Sensitivity: The degree to which the system is influenced by the contextual changes (changes to the
internal parts).
Adaptive capacity: It represents the ability of a system to evolve and enact to reduce vulnerability (Smith
et al., 2013-TRUST)
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Vulnerability Approach
Four capacities for vulnerability (Graaf, 2009):
• Threshold Capacity,
Threshold capacity is the ability of a society to build up a threshold against
variation in order to prevent damage (Damage Prevention).
•
Coping Capacity
Coping capacity is the capacity of society to reduce damage in case of a
disturbance that exceeds the damage threshold (Damage Reduction).
•
Recovery Capacity
Refers to the capacity of a society to recover to the same or an equivalent
state as before the emergency (Damage Reaction).
•
Adapting Capacity
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Failure (Broad meaning)
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A state of inability to perform a normal function;
An unsatisfactory condition;
The inability of a system to meet a specified performance standard
Inability of the system to adequately adapt to perturbations and changes in the real
world given finite resources and time;
 ……
To be specific, in WDS (Mays, 2000)
Failure of WDS (WDN) can be defined as the pressure, flow or both falling below
specified values at one or more nodes within the network.
Consequence
For example: Possible failures/threats (internal) in WDS
Pipe leakage, pipe burst, pump outage, tank failure,
valve locking, inadequate headThreat
pressure, pipe aging, Failure
demand variation, undersized pipes, insufficient pumping,
insufficient storage capacity, combination of these.
Mechanism
Questions/Comments/Discussions?
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Vulnerability (Vulnerability Approach)
 How severe the consequences of failure may be.
 Vulnerability is a function of the character, magnitude, and
rate of climate variation to which a system is exposed, its
sensitivity, and its adaptive capacity (IPCC, 2000).
(Allen Consulting, 2005)
 Vulnerability shaped by the exposure, sensitivity and resilience of the person, system or community
in focus, where exposure relates to the nature of disturbance encountered or projected (Pisano, 2012).
Sensitivity refers to the technical and design characteristics of the system (e.g. location, durability,
stress limits).
 Vulnerability can be broadly defined as the “susceptibility to be harmed” (Smith et al., 2013, TRUST).
It can be measured by exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity (Adger, 2006).
Exposure: The anticipated frequency, magnitude, and duration of potentially harmful
events is referred to as exposure.
Sensitivity: the degree to which the system is influenced by the contextual changes (changes
to the internal changes).
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Threats can be classified as the following groups:
•
Failures (usually in technical system or components failures that cause catastrophes):
e.g. dame breaks, pipe bursts, combined sewer overflows
•
Accidents: Car accident which breaks pipes
•
Attacks (terrorist activities): 11 September
•
Natural hazards/natural disasters (including everything form hurricanes, tsunamis
to flu pandemics to flooding)
•
…
Group A: Resistance, Robustness, Stability, Constancy, Persistence, Reliability
Group B: Adaptability, Adaptation, Adaptive Capacity, Redundancy (interaction)
Group C: Flexibility, Resilience, Elasticity
Group D: Impact, Mitigation, Vulnerability, Sensitivity (interaction)
Group A
In Cambridge/Oxford Dictionaries:
Constancy: The quality of staying the same, not getting less or more
Persistence: The fact of continuing a course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition
Reliability: Consistently good in quality or performance
Resistance: A force that acts to stop the progress of something or make it slower
Robustness: Strong and unlikely to break or fail (Broader area)
Stability: A situation in which something is not likely to move or change
 Probably the two most frequent used terms are Robustness and Reliability in Literature.
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Robustness

A robust system provides excellent performance under normal conditions and deviate minimally from this
during period of upset or challenge (Huck & Coffey, 2004).

•
•
National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) (2009):
The ability to keep operating or to stay standing in the face of disaster.
In some cases, it translates into designing structures or systems to be strong enough to take a foreseeable
punch.
In others, robustness requires devising substitute or redundant systems that can be brought to bear
should something important break or stop working.
Withstanding disruptions requires the system to be robust (Madni & Scott, 2009).
The “robustness” even has been used by sociologist to define the resilience concept (Folke, 2006).
Structural persistence to disturbances (Folke, 2006).
Robustness (referring to engineering systems) is the strength or ability of systems to withstand a given
level of stress or demand without suffering unacceptable degradation or loss of function (Wang &
Blackmore , 2009; Cimellaro et al., 2010).
Stable design under external forces (NSF, 2009)
National Science Foundation (NSF, 2011): Robustness is
- Design‐based criteria
- System flexibility to meet range of future uncertain conditions
•
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Robustness
Looking at the Resilience frameworks in the literature help understanding Robustness concept
NIAC (2009):four features for Resilience:
Robustness : The ability to keep operating or to stay standing in the face of
disaster.
Withstanding disruptions requires the system to be robust. Robustness is
achieved by having “shock absorbers” in the form of, for example, resource
buffers (Madni & Scott, 2009).
1. First stage (0 -t0): Resistance capacity
2. Second stage (t0 – t1): Absorptive capacity
3. Third stage (t1 – tE): Restorative capacity
Ouyang, 2012
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Resilience
Robustness
Robustness
Resilience
Robustness
Resilience
Robustness
Resilience
Robustness
=
Resilience
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Questions/Comments/Discussions?
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Group B: Adaptability, Adaptation, Adaptive Capacity, Redundancy
Adaptive Cycle
That is a conceptual model of the dynamics of coupled systems of people, nature, and technology
(Gunderson and Holling 2002). They have been shown to continually go through dynamic phases of
exploitation (r), conservation (K), release (Ω), and reorganization (α).
Adaptive Cycle in UWS (Blackmore and Plant, 2009)
It is used to describe the dynamics of Social-technical systems that passes through four phases (i.e. r, K, Ω and α).
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Adaptive Capacity/Adaptability/Adaptation
Adaptability/Adaptation
 The means to absorb new lessons that can be drawn from a catastrophe (revising
plans,
modifying procedures and so on to improve robustness, resourcefulness, and recovery
capabilities before the next crisis) (NIAC, 2009).
 It is the capacity of a factor in a system to influence resilience. In STS is the capacity of humans to
manage resilience (Blackmore and Plant, 2009).
Adaptive Capacity
 It is a key measure of a system’s position in adaptive cycle (a measure of system performance)
(Blackmore and Plant, 2009).
 It is the capacity of actors in a system to influence resilience (Pisano, 2012). It involves either or both of
two abilities:
1. The ability to determine the trajectory of the system state - the position within its
current basin of attraction;
2. The ability to alter the shape of the basins, that is move the positions of thresholds or
make the system more or less resistant to perturbation.
 It is the ability of technical, institutional and social components of a system to learn and adjust in
response to a disturbance in order to maintain a desired outcome or change the nature of the desired
outcome (Strengers, 2012).
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Resilience
Adaptive Capacity
 Adaptive Capacity is the capacity of actors in a system to influence resilience
(Blackmore and Plant, 2009)
 Klein (2003) Adopted the umbrella concept to say that adaptive capacity is a factor
influencing resilience.
 Adaptive Capacity is a feature of resilience construct (NIAC, 2009).
 Adaptive Capacity is vital to a system’s ability to increase or decrease
its resilience (Strengers, 2012).
 Adaptive capacity represents the ability of a system to evolve and enact to reduce
vulnerability (Smith et al., 2013-TRUST)
 In ICFR conference (e.g. Batica, …..)

•
•
•
•
Possible parameters of Adaptive Capacity (Wang & Blackmore, 2009):
Redundancy & Connectivity (buffering capacity)
Flexible/adaptive operational management
Knowledge of the system behaviour at it approaches a critical
threshold
Value of reusable capital following a collapse
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A list of generic determinants of adaptive capacity has been developed by Yohe & Tol (2002):

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



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The range of available technological options for adaptation;
The availability of resources and their distribution;
The structure of critical institutions;
The stocks of human and social capital;
Access to risk spreading mechanisms;
The ability of decision-makers to manage risks and information; and
The public’s perceived attribution of the source of stress and the significance of climate change
exposure to its local manifestations.
Adaptive Management (Blackmore and Plant, 2009)
It is treated as an adaptive learning process in which management activities are viewed as the primary
tools for planning, implementation, evaluation and adjustment.
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Resilience
Vulnerability
Adaptive
Capacity
38
Adaptive Capacity
Vulnerability
Resilience
The relationship between vulnerability,
resilience, and adaptive capacity is still
not well articulated.
Conceptual linkages between vulnerability, resilience, and adaptive capacity
(Cutter et al., 2008)
Integrated vulnerability and resilience framework linked through coping and adaptive capacity,
whereby both vulnerability and resilience approaches recognise adaptive capacity.
Berman et al., (2012)
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Questions/Comments/Discussions?
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Transformation/Transformality
 A system’s ability to change itself (Strengers, 2012).
May involve a deliberate change to structures, functions or identity (i.e. achieving a
system transformation). Transformation reflects a very high degree of adaptation,
despite the loss of original system identity, provided this process is deliberate and
results in desired outcomes.
 Transformability is the capacity to cross thresholds into new development trajectories (Pisano,
2012).
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Coping capacity
3-D Resilience Framework
(Shadbolt, 2012)
An illustration of the continuum of change, buffer capacity, adaptive capacity and transformability
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Reliability
 How likely a system is to fail
 NIAC (2009) defined the Reliability in terms of two basic and functional aspects:
Adequacy—The ability of the system to supply the aggregate demand at all times, taking into account
scheduled and reasonably expected unscheduled outages of system elements.
Security—The ability of the system to withstand sudden disturbances from credible contingencies.
 Hashimoto (1982), Blackmore & Plant (2008):
Reliability is the probability that system benefits or performance will be within an acceptable range
(e.g., water demands met sufficiently)/ in a non-failure state;
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Robustness
Robust
Reliability
Reliable
Robust
Reliable
Robust
Reliable
Robust=
Reliable
I think: with regard to the literatures (e.g. NIAC), Robustness has a broader meaning than Reliability,
therefore maybe a Robust system should be Reliable first.
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Questions/Comments/Discussions?
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Pyramid of Safe & SuRe UWS ???
Sustainable
Sustainable
Robust
Resilient
Resilient
Robust
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Categorising sub-properties of resilience (Seith)
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Reliability-Robustness-Resilience-Sustainability
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Challenge
Resilience Approach
Command-Control
To Risk-Based management
To have a sustainable system, the vulnerability of the system to natural hazards, malfunctioning, misconstruction,
misuse, operational failure, etc should be considered (i.e. after anticipation to the prevention/absorption stage).
Therefore:
Option selection should be informed by an analysis of the risk of “unsustainable functioning” due to these threats.
Message 1: Resilience is a measure of sustainability and a key system property.
Message 2: Each system have a different risk of failing to deliver, and this risk can be seen as the overarching
indicator of its sustainability.
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Option selection
based on risk
assessment
To
Anticipate
To
To
Learn
Absorb
Resilient
STS
To Recover
To
Risk-based
prevention
and/or
adaptation ???
Adapt
For example: Of two systems that have the same nominal performance, the one with the lower
risk of failure will be preferable; a system with a lower risk of failure might even be preferred
over one with “better” nominal performance (Blackmore and Diaper 2004).
Some form of risk assessment, leading to reliable risk management, is therefore a necessary
component of sustainability assessment.
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