Abstract
This chapter has been written for engineering practitioners, support staff and researchers interested in how to assess and manage risks that arise because critical infrastructures are interconnected, and increasingly so. Infrastructures are large technical systems for water, electricity, transportation, telecommunications and financial services, among others, whose assets and services are considered vital to society. These engineered systems operate under legal, regulatory and mission mandates to be highly reliable, that is, to ensure the safe and continuous provision of the critical service in question, even during (especially during) peak demand or turbulent times. Because they operate under high reliability mandates, their control operators and staff take risk assessment and management seriously. This chapter focuses on what we consider to be neglected but extremely important topics related to the assessment, management and tracking of risks at the interconnected critical infrastructure system (ICIS) level. Special features of infrastructure control rooms are discussed, and an empirical analysis demonstrates conditions under which interconnected infrastructures share risks for joint management purposes.
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Notes
- 1.
This subsection has been co-authored with Benjamin Baker and is adapted from a 2011 RESIN working paper, “Case Study of Interconnected Critical Infrastructures in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta: The interconnectivity of water and power flows at the State Water Project’s Harvey O. Banks Pumps, near Tracy California,” by Benjamin Baker, Emery Roe and Paul Schulman. Details of the data sources, methods, and acknowledgements are found there.
- 2.
A host of other recurring or one-off factors may be involved, such as major fires in October 2007 in southern California, regulatory requirements for smelt and salmon, and gearing up to meet Army Corps of Engineering flood control reserve requirements in major reservoirs.
- 3.
For example, we wondered whether hydropower produced by the SWP pumps at high flow periods could have some such effect on the CAISO grid, but those whom we asked did not see how.
- 4.
Preliminary analysis suggests that unscheduled generation outages (OUT) may have had a statistically significant effect on Banks usage of electricity during on-peak hours during July 2004–December 2005 (the only period for which we had on-and-off peak hourly data). We were told that SWP generation of electricity is done during on-peak hours.
- 5.
The beta-coefficient is the amount of change induced in the dependent variable by one unit change in the independent variable. If the beta-coefficient were not significantly different from zero, the effect would be to multiply zero times any MIT or CPS2 value, thus rendering the variable as having no effect on the dependent variable, WFLOW.
- 6.
The “2006” in Table 13.1 is based on a calendar year.
- 7.
The thrust of this argument is that there may be reciprocal resilience on the part of each infrastructure. In this view, what makes the wet weather year of 2006 special is that the SWP was able to detach its management of the Banks pumps from CAISO requirements, and CAISO was able to function without relying on Banks water flows as part of its load. Before this can be asserted with confidence, however, much more empirical research would have to be done.
- 8.
An important next step would be to determine how well the daily relationship holds when we drill down to the hourly level for September and October. To do so would require hourly WFLOW data. Access to such information has been restricted for security and competitive market reasons.
- 9.
It is interesting to note that those 15 days when Banks was shut down for scheduled maintenance and repair were days (with respect to water flows) and hours (with respect to electricity inflows) when CAISO operators managed to have fewer line mitigations and CPS2 violations compared to study period averages.
- 10.
The process of precursor resilience is described in more detail as bandwidth management under active analysis in Roe and Schulman [1].
- 11.
None of the days of zero water flows through the Banks Pumps during the study period occurred in September or October.
References
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Acknowledgments
Over the last 3 years, the authors have been very fortunate to talk to many key informants on Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta infrastructures and to work with other team members in doing so as part of the University of California Berkeley RESIN (Resilient and Sustainable Infrastructure Networks) project supported by the National Science Foundation. Special thanks go to Benjamin Baker for his work on the Sect. 13.4 case study. We also appreciate the editorial assistance of Ingrid Bouwer Utne and Per Hokstad (see especially Utne et al. [10]). None are responsible for any errors of fact, analysis or interpretation that have intruded into this chapter. This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0836047. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Roe, E., Schulman, P.R. (2012). Risk Management of Interconnected Infrastructures: An Empirical Study of Joint Stress Conditions. In: Hokstad, P., Utne, I., Vatn, J. (eds) Risk and Interdependencies in Critical Infrastructures. Springer Series in Reliability Engineering. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4661-2_13
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