Resilience engineering

Fraunhofer EMI analyzes socio-technical systems: critical infrastructures, urban spaces, industrial processes and coupled networks using different modeling approaches. The models are implemented in software applications. The institute investigates system behavior in the event of disruptions. This enables it to identify weak points and develop solutions for measuring and increasing resilience.

How can social system components be integrated into modeling? The institute investigates the coping capacity of socio technical systems during crises and disruptions. For example, individual processes, buildings or even entire cities and regions are analyzed. The aim is to identify all the important parts and components of the system and to understand how they work together. Technical, personnel, economic and organizational aspects are taken into account. Social system components are systematically recorded in the modeling with specific stochastic properties and included in the modeling in the same way as technical components.

How effectively can individual measures increase the level of resilience? Quantitative models make it possible to characterize individual resilience phases, dimensions and properties:

Based on this multivariate concept, a wide variety of systems are analyzed at Fraunhofer EMI. Examples include buildings, urban areas, infrastructure systems and industrial processes. The comparison of different measures enables an assessment of their efficiency.

How resilient is a municipality to a power outage? Systematic recording of system components and their dependencies is achieved by representing them in a network structure. The nodes represent relevant components (e.g. personnel, machines), while the edges depict their physical and logical connections. Fraunhofer EMI uses network analysis to investigate the resilience of critical infrastructures and identify cascading effects between sectors, such as the impact of a power outage on hospitals.

How can stochastic modeling be used to assess the safety of autonomous driving? The evaluation of automated driving functions, taking into account all scenarios, environmental conditions and road users, is extremely challenging. Fraunhofer EMI

uses statistical models to analyze failure rates. Markov modeling is used to derive reliability statements about the vehicle and its subfunctions, taking into account environmental conditions, driving situations and sensor failure rates.

How can the movement behavior of people or flows of people be simulated? Agent-based simulation is characterized by its ability to model the behavior of individual actors within a system and to analyze their interactions in dynamic environments. Fraunhofer EMI integrates such behavioral aspects into socio-technical model development and uses this information to control temporal developments in network analyses. In addition, EMI has developed an agent-based simulation that simulates the movement of people in buildings and open spaces, such as at events. This allows detailed aspects of the human system components in socio-technical systems to be considered.

How can building protection against exceptional loads be increased? Extraordinary stresses, such as explosions or extreme weather, put a strain on buildings and are often not taken into account in planning. The Safety and Resilience business unit has the expertise to characterize such loads and their effects. Engineering methods or numerical simulations, which are validated with test facilities at Fraunhofer EMI, form the basis for assessment. The hazards, possible damage and protective measures are systematically characterized. The methods form the basis for assessing robustness. Examples include the protection of properties against terrorist attacks, explosion protection on factory premises or the evaluation of protective measures against strong wind and flood events.