A Resilience Assessment Framework for Infrastructure and Economic Systems: Quantitative and Qualitative Resilience Analysis of Petrochemical Supply Chains to a Hurricane

In recent years, the nation has recognized that critical infrastructure protection should consider not only the prevention of disruptive events but also the processes that infrastructure systems undergo to maintain functionality following disruptions. This more comprehensive approach has been termed critical infrastructure resilience. Given the occurrence of a particular disruptive event, the resilience of a system to that event is the system's ability to reduce efficiently both the magnitude and duration of the deviation from targeted system performance levels. Under the direction of the U. S. Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate, Sandia National Laboratories has developed a comprehensive resilience assessment framework for evaluating the resilience of infrastructure and economic systems. The framework includes a quantitative methodology that measures resilience costs that result from a disruption to infrastructure function. The framework also includes a qualitative analysis methodology that assesses system characteristics affecting resilience to provide insight and direction for potential improvements. This article describes the resilience assessment framework and demonstrates the utility of the assessment framework through application to two hypothetical scenarios involving the disruption of a petrochemical supply chain by hurricanes. (C) 2011 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 30: 280-290, 2011