ABSTRACT
Risk management is a fundamental approach to improving critical infrastructure systems’ safety against disruptive events. This approach focuses on designing robust critical infrastructure systems (CISs) that could resist disruptive events by minimizing the possible events’ probability and consequences using preventive and protective programs. However, recent disasters like COVID-19 have shown that most CISs cannot stand against all potential disruptions. Recently there is a transition from robust design to resilience design of CISs, increasing the focus on preparedness, response, and recovery. Resilient CISs withstand most of the internal and external shocks, and if they fail, they can bounce back to the operational phase as soon as possible using minimum resources. Moreover, in resilient CISs, early warning enables managers to get timely information about the proximity and development of distributions. An understanding of the concept of resilience, its influential factors, and available evaluation and analyzing tools are required to have effective resilience management. Moreover, it is important to highlight the current gaps. Technological resilience is a new concept associated with some ambiguity around its definition, its terms, and its applications. Hence, using the concept of resilience without understanding these variations may lead to ineffective pre- and post-disruption planning. A well-established systematic literature review can provide a deep understanding regarding the concept of resilience, its limitation, and applications. The aim of this paper is to conduct a systematic literature review to study the current research around technological CISs’ resilience. In the review, 192 primary studies published between 2003 and 2020 are reviewed. Based on the results, the concept of resilience has gradually found its place among researchers since 2003, and the number of related studies has grown significantly. It emerges from the review that a CIS can be considered as resilient if it has (i) the ability to imagine what to expect, (ii) the ability to protect and resist a disruption, (iii) the ability to absorb the adverse effects of disruption, (iv) the ability to adapt to new conditions and changes caused by disruption, and (v) the ability to recover the CIS’s normal performance level after a disruption. It was shown that robustness is the most frequent resilience contributing factor among the reviewed primary studies. Resilience analysis approaches can be classified into four main groups: empirical, simulation, index-based, and qualitative approaches. Simulation approaches, as dominant models, mostly study real case studies, while empirical methods, specifically those that are deterministic, are built based on many assumptions that are difficult to justify in many cases.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Large-scale events such as COVID-19 show that there are situations that can lead to huge stress on health infrastructure systems (HIS). The pandemic reveals that it is very difficult to protect HIS from all kinds of possible hazards. They can be unpredictable and spread rapidly; hence, it is hard to find an effective mitigation strategy to completely protect society and its important HIS. METHODS: An often raised central question is what we should do if we cannot protect HIS from these types of hazards. To answer this question, the focus should move from HIS protection to HIS resilience. Therefore, in this paper, the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Index (CIRI) is used to estimate the resilience of health infrastructure systems. RESULTS: The results of the case study show that HIS resilience was enhanced significantly after the implementation of measures. The results indicate that among the resilience phases the learning phase of resilience is the weakest part. This requires a root cause analysis, which should be prioritized by HIS managers and stakeholders. CONCLUSION: This paper discusses how the resilience concept will help decision- and policy-makers to have a clear view of HIS performance before, during, and after the disaster. An easy-to-use and applicable methodology for HIS assessment and evaluation was employed. It can be concluded that resilience and its identified phases can help HIS managers to allocate available resources accordingly in the phases during and post-crisis.