17. An Indicator-Based Approach to Assessing Resilience of Smart Critical Infrastructures

The overall resilience of modern societies is largely determined by and dependent on resilience of their critical infrastructures (CI). These infrastructures are becoming increasingly smarter and more efficient by means of smart technologies such as sensors, gateways, processors. The use of smart technologies also makes the CIs increasingly interdependent and vulnerable to various hazards. CI resilience against threats, such as cyber-attacks, terrorist attacks, natural hazards, is pivotal to ensure continued operations and well-being of the society. To achieve this goal, understanding and measuring the resilience of the CI is of key importance. The main objective of the current research agenda is to improve existing approaches by providing an innovative “holistic” methodology for assessing resilience of smart critical infrastructures. The methodology proposed here, as part of the SmartResilience project, is based on resilience indicators (RIs), and it is structured in six levels (RIs, issues, phases, threats, CIs, and area/city) to obtain a measurement of the CI resilience within an area such as a city. The methodology helps understand “how resilient the CIs are against particular threats” and “what measures could help improve their resilience.” Furthermore, the chapter also provides first results of the implementation in sample case studies. This methodology is expected to be useful to visualize, trend, and benchmark the resilience at regular intervals, contributing to resilience management of smart critical infrastructures.