Resilient infrastructure: how technology should fit within a resilience strategy

Last week I shared my thoughts and experiences on how data can inform infrastructure engineering decisions. I rashly promised a follow-up post, so here’s one on the upsides and downsides of increased digital connectivity of our rail infrastructure.

I’m as convinced and excited as everyone else by the opportunities that the digital revolution presents to infrastructure systems, particularly in terms of value and efficiency. I feel equally strongly that infrastructure organisations need to be mindful of the complexities of digitally connected infrastructure when thinking about their business resilience.

But first, let’s go back to the year 1914, Yellowstone National Park in the US (bear with me, as I do have a point)… A massive wolf culling was ordered because of the problems the wolves were causing in the park. But, once all the wolves were gone, all sorts of unforeseen problems arose – including the explosion of the elk population, which led to problems with vegetation and riverbanks, which impacted the beavers, and the fish, in fact the entire ecosystem. When wolves were gradually reintroduced, the system did not return to its previous state* So Yellowstone Park behaved as a complex system, with emergent properties that cannot be predicted by only looking at the individual components.

Infrastructure systems, with their multiple nodes of connectivity, to other systems, and to the people who use, own, operate and construct them are complex –  their behaviour can’t be easily predicted, and tightly coupled (meaning that one small failure can lead to a chain of events that can’t be stopped). 

When we overlay a digital system onto these, it is highly likely that this will increase both the complexity and the tightness of coupling. What this means is that the likelihood of a failure somewhere in the system having a significant impact also increases. 

BUT - if we take rail networks as an example; digital failure is only one of a myriad of other possible shocks and stresses, ranging from cyber security attacks to strike action to skills shortages to population growth to weather and climate change. New digital technologies are fundamentally important in creating a network that is resilient to any number of these. Some diverse examples:

• the Digital Railway is essential to achieve the necessary capacity increase over the next 25 years (so improves resilience to increased demand)
• the embedded technology in the Queensferry crossing will deliver a step change in asset management and maintenance decisions (so improves resilience to asset failure)
• early warning systems in Japan have been proven to safely stop the Shinkansen trains before strong earthquake ground shaking arrives (so improves resilience to earthquake hazard)

When we talk about a resilient business, this is what we mean, holistic consideration of all the factors than can enhance or decrease resilience holistically. 

At Arup, we advocate a systems thinking approach to enhance resilience. 

Businesses should avoid focussing in on known hazards (such as climate change), identifying a solution (such as smart infrastructure monitoring), and inadvertently creating a new problem, such as the potential for digital system failures. Do you see the analogy now, with the wolves, and the elks…..?! 

* I can’t take the credit for this story to illustrate complexity – it’s told in a much better way here. I’m a huge fan of using stories like this to illustrate some of our rather niche challenges.