Scorecard for the assessment of critical-infrastructure resilience

By definition, critical infrastructure provides essential functions and services for our society. Resilience denotes the quality to be prepared for adverse events, to withstand them and to quickly restore functionality. This is why knowledge about the resilience of items of critical infrastructure is decisive. The European research project RESILENS (Realising European Resilience for Critical Infrastructure) aims to make concepts of resilience applicable to critical infrastructure. One central issue for this is the assessment of critical-infrastructure resilience.

For this purpose, Fraunhofer EMI, together with RESILENS project partners, implemented a web-based software. For its development, a scorecard approach was chosen – similar to the Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities by the UN.

By answering a questionnaire, the user can gather the properties of the critical infrastructure concerned, from which the degree of resilience can be deduced. The questions cover organizational, technical and societal properties for all phases: before, during and after an adverse event. The subsequent evaluation allows to make statements about the resilience of the critical infrastructure in question offering different levels of detail.

European critical-infrastructure operators responsible for water and power supply as well as transport are currently testing the applicability of the web-based tool in their pilot studies within the project. Due to its positive experience with using a scorecard for the evaluation of resilience, Fraunhofer EMI plans on adopting this approach also for the evaluation of sustainability within a joint project with the city of Freiburg.

Interview with Jörg Finger, project manager of the resilience work packages assigned to Fraunhofer EMI.