Published: February 2014 | Category: Economic development , Research programme , Research & reports | Audience: Road traffic engineers & consultants
Internationally there is a growing call to improve the resilience of our critical infrastructure. This is in response to a realisation that the services we take for granted may be robust in the face of predictable hazards/failures, but are in fact extremely fragile in the face of unanticipated shocks.
In the context of transport infrastructure, operators strive to ensure that transport assets and services function continually and safely in the face of a range of existing and emerging hazards. This has led to a specific focus on the concept of resilience and how this can be defined, measured and improved across the transport system.
The theory of resilience was researched and a measurement framework has been proposed that broadly covers both technical and organisational dimensions of resilience and breaks these down into specific principles and measures which can be utilised to qualitatively assess resilience.
The measurement of resilience was approached from a view that a risk management approach alone is not sufficient and needs to be complemented by an awareness that resilience requires both consideration of events that fall outside of the realms of predictability and, importantly, that failure is inevitable.
Keywords: criticality, failure, hazards, infrastructure, resilience, risk, transport, vulnerability
