Resilience and Risk

Management

Mohammed M. Ettouney, Ph.D., P.E., MBA, F.AEI, Dist.M.ASCE

Outline

• Historical background and acknowledgements

• Generic definitions of risk and resilience

• Resilience is a subset of risk

– Why is this simple fact of importance

• Need for objectivity

• Resilience management vs. Risk Management

• Some recent developments

• Concluding remarks

Historical background and

acknowledgement

• The first objective resilience processes (if I am

wrong, please correct me) was made possible in

several US-DHS publications (2010 and 2011)

– The program was initiated and managed by Ms. Mila Kennett of US-DHS

– Contractor was Mr. Eric Letvin (working for URS at that time)

– Later contractors: Mr. Earle Kennett and Mr. Roger Grant working for NIBS

– I was lucky enough to be part of that team -

Generic definitions of risk and

resilience

• Reasonable risk definition, Ettouney and Alampalli (2016)

– Risk is a description of an uncertain alpha-numeric expression (objective or subjective) which describes an outcome of unfavorable uncertain event which might degrade performance of a single (or community of) civil infrastructure asset (or assets).

• Reasonable Resilience Definition, NIAC (2009)

– Infrastructure resilience is the ability to reduce the magnitude and/or duration of disruptive events. The effectiveness of a resilient infrastructure or enterprise depends upon its ability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to, and/or rapidly recover from a potentially disruptive event.

Resilience Definition (Operation

and Time) – 1

Resilience Definition (Operation

and Time) – 2

Resilience Definition (Operation

and Time) – 3

Resilience Definition – 4 Rs

R1 R2 R3

R4

Time Function

Resilience· R1 = Robustness· R2 = Resourcefulness· R3 = Recovery· R4 = Redundancy

Resilience and Risk – 1

Resilience ComponentsRisk Components

Threat / Hazard

Vulnerability

Consequences

Redundancy

Robustness

Resourcefulness

Recovery

Relationship between risk and

resilience components

Resilience and Risk – 2

Resilience is a subset of risk

• Why is this simple fact of importance?

• We can use the wealth of methods, processes,

management techniques that are available for

risk and specialize it for resilience

• This is also mean that the urban legend which permeates some quarters regarding the impossibility of quantifying resilience is wrong and misguided

Resilience management vs. Risk

Management

Resilience Assessment

• Needs a reasonable balance of objective

and subjective processing

• Needs to accommodate a reasonable

balance of asset and community

modeling

– Essentiality of linking all important

parameters

• All types of infrastructure assets needs to

be considered and linked appropriately

– Buildings is only a part of the equation

Example: community and asset

resilience – 1

Example: community and asset

resilience – 2

Example: community and asset

resilience – 3

Resilience Acceptance

• We need to ask ourselves:

– What are an accepted resilience threshold?

– How does this accepted resilience threshold

vary as a function of different hazards which

govern our decision making?

– Do the 4Rs intersect in such a way so as to

affect the accepted resilience thresholds?

• All of the above are important questions,

with no known good answers

Risk Acceptance thresholds as a

function of Multihazards

Resilience Treatment

• Remember: ‘mitigation’ is only one component of ‘treatment’

• There are many similarities between risk

and resilience treatment strategies

• However, their exists several important

differences

Similarities

of

Treatment

Phases

• Risk and resilience

share fairly similar

treatment phases

• The details and

objectives can be

different, of

course

Risk / Resilience Treatment Process

Phase I: Treatment Strategy

Phase II: Project Plans & Prioritizations

Phase III: Execute strategy

Do nothing

RemoveTransfer responsibility

Mitigate(Improvement projects)

Reduce / eliminate threats

Move asset (if possible)

Other

Reduce / Eliminate consequences

Prioritize assets within network

Plan different projects

Other

Prioritize mitigation projects

Differences between Risk and

Resilience Treatments Category Risk Resilience Transfer Yes Not in direct manner. Resilience

transfer might be considers as part

of improving redundancy, which

belongs in the mitigation category Mitigate Reduce one or

more of three

components

· Threat

· Vulnerability

· Consequence

Improve one or more of four

components

· Robustness

· Resourcefulness

· Recovery

· Redundancy Ignore Yes Yes Remove Yes Resilience requirements might not

be fully removed since operations

will always need to continue. So,

removal might be considered as a

mitigation category.

Resilience Monitoring

• Resilience of assets or communities

changes as time progress.

– Demands increase

– Capacities (operational or physical) decrease

– These result in an inevitable decrease of

resilience with passing of time

• Thus an institution of resilience

monitoring is paramount as a part of

resilience management

Monitoring is an integral part of

Resilience Management

Resilience Communications

• Communication, as part of management,

is perhaps the most important

management component

– Laswell (1946) instituted five aspects of risk

(can easily be used for resilience)

communications

– Effective communications needs to always be

front and center

Resilience Communications – 1

• Objective simulation of Laswell communication model

Resilience Communications – 2 • Effective communications are must during every

resilience management component

– The graph shows communications during resilience assessment

Some recent developments

• A newly formed technical committee of

the Engineering Mechanics Institute (EMI)

of American Society of Civil Engineers

aims at studying aspects of objective

resilience: Objective Resilience

Committee (ORC)

• One of our first planned products is an

objective resilience manual of practice

• If interested in ORC, contact me -

Concluding remarks

• The relationships between risk and

resilience

• Resilience management components are,

by extension, intertwined with risk

management and its components

• Essentiality of both objective and

subjective sides of resilience (similar to

risk)

• Establishment of ORC

Thanks for your indulgence.

It was good while it lasted

It will be even better as we

delve into the future