Resilience: Modeling for Conditions of Uncertainty and Change

Resilience is an adaptive approach for managing a wide-range of energy/infrastructure-related risks. Simply stated, resilient entities survive and thrive under changing conditions. In contrast with traditional risk management approaches, which address discrete events or threats, resilience is a proactive, holistic approach to structuring fundamental processes and relationships to make them robust but flexible to respond to any type of challenge or change. Moreover, resiliency objectives focus on outcomes, such as protecting life and property or achieving a mission, in the face of change, rather than on simply protecting systems designed for nominal performance. Resilient systems may retain health through passive features, operational flexibility and decentralized decisions, which are more likely to manifest through iterative, even experimental processes, rather than traditional linear-design processes. In the context of communities and infrastructure, most traditional analysis techniques have focused upon preservation of essential functions, with some attention given to physical system interdependencies such as reliance upon power supplies. Considering the fundamental contrasts between deterministic design optimization concepts and the broader consideration of complex, cross-domain relationships in resilience thinking, there is an evident need for new models and techniques. Two relevant but contrasting approaches offer useful examples to explore in the context of this challenge. Military capability development procedures exemplify structured analysis toward a complex outcome, integrating qualitative operational analysis (war-gaming) with quantitative system (engineering) models in a correlated manner. Civilian emergency response communities focus on more flexible, descriptive processes that examine operational scenarios and gather expert insights which in turn inform stakeholder action, such as electric utility investments to improve reliability. This paper compares these techniques and offers recommendations for a hybrid approach to resilient design and energy portfolio development.