Book Interview: Critical Infrastructures Resilience: Policy and Engineering Principles

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Big Data (Zoran Obradovic, BIG): Why did you decide to write your book Critical Infrastructures Resilience ?

Udit Bhatia : This book is the result of having taught a graduate course comprising public policy and engineering students at Northeastern University, Boston, for the past 4 years. The genesis of this textbook came out of teaching the course, and the final contents have evolved significantly given the pace of new developments within this field. Throughout these years, we have found no good textbook that covers the engineering and policy aspects of critical infrastructures resilience in comprehensive yet principled way. Hence, we decided to write the textbook ourselves. This book discusses and formalizes creative approaches to the complex challenge of managing the interfaces across coupled natural-built system of systems. This includes addressing the following:

Key concepts and terminologies for critical infrastructures resilience.

State-of-the-art and emerging methods and principles in reliability and risk-based engineering and how risk-based approaches compare with recently proposed resilience frameworks.

Resilience of lifeline infrastructure systems, including transportation, water distribution and waste water systems, power distribution, and communication systems when subjected to multiple natural and man-made hazards.

Offering a solid balance between theory and practice, including various exercises, examples of state-of-art in field of resilience from other nations and organizations, and case studies originating from scientific research and teaching experience.

BIG: Who is your targeted audience?

Mr. Bhatia : This book is primarily intended to be a text for a course in critical infrastructures resilience for upper class undergraduates and first or second year graduate students. The primary target are students across multiple engineering disciplines, including civil and environmental engineering, industrial engineering and mechanical engineering, and electrical and computer engineering, especially those students who are interested in sectors such as power grid, transportation, water distribution, cyber security, and emergency preparedness. In addition to the engineering principles of resilience, the students will be introduced to the relevant social sciences, specifically economics and policy considerations. The secondary audience is students in policy and the social sciences who are interested in the economics and policy of resilience, while getting a background in engineering. The engineering students may focus more on the engineering sections with a background on policy and economics and the other way around for social science students.

The materials covered, including the case studies, are drawn from a flipped classroom course taught at Northeastern University in the area of critical infrastructures resilience where the students were drawn from both engineering and policy, participated in role playing negotiations, or war games across infrastructure sectors in the context of a major infrastructure owner and operator, with tailored assignments. Undergraduate students in policy or engineering who are interested in understanding the engineering or policy aspects, respectively, of resilient recovery and design, which are not taught in either curricula currently, may treat this book as a reference. In addition, with the Presidential Policy Directive on Critical infrastructure Security and Resilience, the efforts to strengthen and maintain secure, functioning, and resilient critical infrastructure are growing and are expected to increase in near future. Hence, this book would serve as a reference for practitioners and working professionals for their usual disciplinary training.

BIG: How is this book organized? Are you planning ahead for second edition?

Mr. Bhatia: This book is organized into five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the key concepts and terminologies for critical infrastructure resilience. In addition to discussing basic engineering principles and mathematical concepts, the chapter attempts to highlight the implications and relevance of policy. Chapter 2 discusses conventional risk assessment frameworks as applied to structural and infrastructural design and management. This chapter covers state-of-the-art and emerging methods and principles in reliability and risk-based engineering with examples. It is noted that since lot of work has been done in the areas of risk assessment for these systems both by academicians and practitioners, we have alluded to such work without repeating what already exists in the literature and other textbooks.

Chapter 3 discusses the concept of hazard modeling, different categories of hazards, their nature of evolution, and approaches to understand these hazards. This chapter also introduces the concept of nonstationarity in risks, with specific focus on climate-related hazards. The extent to which a hazard turns into disaster depends on exposure, and vulnerability is also discussed in this chapter.

Chapter 4 further elaborates on the concepts of resilience paradigm, which includes elements of risk assessment but goes further. Although risk management approaches focus on identifying, assessing, and taking steps to reduce risk to an acceptable level, resilience paradigm aspires to design effective and efficient recovery strategies in advance, which entails reducing downtimes, and even learning from hazards to reduce fragility. This chapter discusses opportunities and challenges, including emerging methods and tools, with specific resilience examples on individual and interconnected lifeline infrastructure networks at both the regional and urban scales.

Chapter 5 discusses various impediments and opportunities for critical infrastructure resilience policies. Whole developed nations have already started to take steps toward building resilience, developing and emerging economies are also beginning to catch up. However, devastating consequences of recent disasters across the globe have demonstrated that communities and nations (even developed nations) are still far from resilient. Hence, chapter 5 covers the policy measures for resilience that are necessary to both drive and work in tandem, with engineering and scientific approaches. One appendix is included that contains standard probability distribution tables required to solve exercises and examples throughout the book. We have often used transportation systems as an illustrative example in many examples and exercises. This choice is primarily guided by the availability of data sets that we have gathered over the course of years.

The field of critical infrastructures resilience is multidisciplinary and still evolving. In the first edition, we have tried to introduce novel concepts around related to the topic that has high societal urgency. To avoid repetitions and verbosity, we have alluded to research articles, case studies, and books that already pre-exist. Moreover, certain topics, such as life cycle analysis, agent-based modeling, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and cyber-resilience, are not covered extensively in this edition. We are planning proactively for second edition and we look forward to the feedback and suggestion of readers for second edition.

BIG: Is there any additional material provided?

Mr. Bhatia: Yes, we have created an open-access GitHub repository ^* where users can access various data sets and MATLAB codes that are used throughout the book.

BIG: When will it be available, and can it already be ordered?

Mr. Bhatia: Yes, it can be purchased on Amazon, Google books, and various other online stores. Kindle edition is also available through Amazon. We are looking forward to hearing your feedback!