Project information and status

SmartResilience aims to facilitate the improvement of the resilience of the increasingly smarter infrastructures, by making several steps in identifying and assessing effectively their ability to anticipate, prepare for, adapt, withstand, respond and recover from threats. SmartResilience follows a holistic approach that considers a broad range of issues like human factors, security, geopolitics, economy etc., identifying existing indicators and developing new "smart" ones, including those from Big Data. The project aims to also develop advanced methodologies and tools, for assessing resilience. SmartResilience indicators, methodologies and tools will be tested at 8 single case studies, which take into account a broad range of different infrastructures and threats, as well as at one virtual Europe-wide case that binds and brings together the single case studies, studying the cascading effects of "tainted" flood.

SmartResilience, funded under the Horizon 2020 call H2020-DRS-14-2015: "Disaster-Resilience: Safeguarding and securing society, including adapting to climate change", was officially launched in May '16, and the consortium consists of 20 partners including Research Organisations leading in Security and Crisis Management, End users, Academies providing knowledge in crisis management, innovative and specialized SMEs and a platform organisation with large networks of providers, research organisations and end users. The first results are already publicly available, namely the "Initial framework for SmartResilience Resilience Assessment", "Usability and limitations of existing indicators for assessing, predicting and monitoring critical infrastructure resilience" and "End user requirements". Further results are expected in the upcoming months, more specifically the "Report on Challenges for SCIs", as well as the "Early exploitation and dissemination plan". All the public results of SmartResilience are available for direct download at the official website, www.smartresilience.eu-vri.eu

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What is resilience for SmartResilience?

There is a wide variety of definitions for the term 'resilience' in different research areas and fields of application. A huge number of articles and reports have been developed to analyze the term and discuss its understanding and usage on a theoretical basis. Several comprehensive reviews on the term including qualitative and quantitative analysis, as well as expert interviews have been conducted.

SmartResilience started with an initial concept of critical infrastructure resilience and consolidated the results reported by relevant projects that addressed the topic EU H2020 DRS-07-2014 "Crises and disaster resilience - operationalizing resilience concepts" and also by additional sources such as international and US organizations, industry and standards.

This review led to the following definition: "Resilience of an infrastructure is the ability to understand risks, anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to changing conditions and withstand, respond to, and recover rapidly from disruption". This definition will be revisited during the course of the different project tasks to address open questions such as whether a "transformative" character should be included as a main component of resilience, or if "ability" and "capacity" should be distinguished and also what should be considered when identifying relevant issues for the resilience of specific Smart Critical Infrastructures.

Highlights of the requirements analysis

Upon establishing a common baseline for SmartResilience, the identification of end users' challenges, needs and requirements has been completed. The task has been guided by an actor analysis approach and based mainly on qualitative methods, with semi-structured individual and group interviews, desktop studies and literature reviews.

Task highlights:

Expert Workshop on airports as Smart Critical Infrastructure

As a result of Smart Airports project, civil aviation industry and airports itself have changed already and the future Airport 4.0 concept will foster more changes towards smart aviation industry. New, smart results simplify the life of passengers as well as the operating staff, not to mention saving of costs. However, from the side of resilience, this change of environment does not automatically mean improvement: as it solves several issues, it creates others. This also means we have to review currently existing models for assessment of resilience, including, for example, risk analysis, crisis management and business continuity management. Creation of a Smart Critical Infrastructure Resilience Assessment Model is strongly needed, not only for Smart Airports, but for all Smart Critical Infrastructures. The society needs a system of resilience management going beyond conventional risk management, in order to address the complexities of large integrated systems and the uncertainty of future threats.

Understanding end users' challenges, needs and requirements for assessing resilience is a basic need for the SmartResilience project. To facilitate this in case of airports, a localized expert workshop was held on 16th of September, implementing a group interview and a round table discussion at the premises of the Airport Police Directorate, Hungarian National Police, which is one of the consortium members, as end user partner. The invited experts had 13 to 30 years of experience in critical infrastructure protection and business operations in a critical infrastructure. Besides police and disaster management senior officers, aviation security, national security and counter-terrorism agents were sitting on the government side, while the private sector was represented by airport operators, flight controllers, flight company security officers and last but not least, the Hungarian research partner of the consortium, ensuring application of scientific methods and securing results of the workshop.

In order to maintain the effectiveness of security operations as well as personal security of the participating officials, no pictures are allowed to be released from the workshop in public. Public version of the records are implemented into project delivery ‘D1.3 End-users’ challenges, needs and requirements for assessing resilience’ and published on the project website. List of participants, pictures and records are filed by the Project Security Officer and only accessible to persons with appropriate security clearance and access permission from the Hungarian National Police. Publication of such information can only be permitted in case of justified public interest, claims have to be declared to the National Data Protection Office in Hungary

Best regards,
The Dissemination Manager (Anastasia Garbi - ED) and the Project Manager (Bastien Caillard – EU-VRi)
On behalf of the SmartResilience Consortium.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 700621

Project coordinated by: Prof. Dr. Aleksandar Jovanović - jovanovic@eu-vri.eu EU-VRi – European Virtual Institute for Integrated Risk Management Haus der Wirtschaft, Willi-Bleicher-Straße 19, 70174 Stuttgart, Germany Tel: +49 711 410041 27, Fax: +49 711 410041 24 – www.eu-vri.eu – info@eu-vri.eu Registered in Stuttgart, Germany under HRA 720578

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