Our guest practitioner this week is John Thomas, an expert in systems management, especially the resilience of complex built systems, such as we find in all of our specialization areas - including water and energy infrastructure, transportation, food, and more. I append his bio below.
John has prepared the following introduction for us - I also append his guide to the readings (note that only SELECTIONS are required).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Natural and man-made threats and catastrophes are increasing in frequency and magnitude, causing Federal and state agencies to focus on securing resilient infrastructure to protect public health, safety, and well-being. However, because resilience is a relatively new concept, there are no integrated concepts, methods or models to turn to for guidance and no established practices to emulate. Its an exciting new field, with lots of experimentation underway.
The purpose of this week's class is to introduce resilience by considering practical applications to urban infrastructure such as power, water, transportation, and communications. The class will present a complex systems perspective on resilience, with practical examples and applications to critical infrastructure systems. Class discussion will center on readings that describe resilient systems and review Federal policy guidelines for critical infrastructure. The class will involve a combination of lecture, discussion, and in-class group exercises based on a real world case study. The reading assignments for the class do not assume prior or special knowledge about resilience or infrastructure systems. The exercises will engage students to form small groups and work together to conduct assessments to a proposed problem scenario.
For a more in-depth perspective on John's work and perspective he brings to resilience, see the abstract and diagram on this website: http://integralresilience.org/p3/
John Thomas completed his PhD in Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. His research focuses on critical infrastructure resilience and the relationships between human systems interacting with technological systems. John received a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and a MBA at Santa Clara University. He has over 20 years of professional experience across a range of industries including wireless communications, software development, semiconductors, defense radar, and consumer electronics.
Required readings:
1) (Hollnagel, Paries, Woods, & Wreathall, 2011) The Resilience Analysis Grid offers a method for assessing the resilience processes of a socio-technical system. The four processes correspond to sensing, anticipating, adapting, and learning. The grid provides a set of questions as a starting point for interrogating a system and obtaining a resilience measurement. This document is the epilogue chapter in the book, which is titled ‘Resilience Engineering in Practice.’ (pages—all)
2) (Park, Seager, Rao, Convertino, & Linkov, 2013) This paper makes important distinctions between risks and resilience concepts applied to complex systems. Four processes that characterize the resilience of a socio-technical system are identified—sensing, anticipating, adapting, and learning. These processes are further explored during the in-class exercises. (pages 356-362, Sections 1-3.1)
3) (The White House, 2013) Presidential policy directive 21 establishes national policy on critical infrastructure security and resilience. The directive identifies 16 segments of infrastructure and calls for Federal agencies to develop plans to coordinate with public and private infrastructure owners and operators. (pages 1-3, 6-7)
Additional readings—optional
4) (DHS, 2013) The National Infrastructure Protection Plan was developed by the Department of Homeland Security in response to PPD-21. The document identifies key functions, roles, and responsibilities for a range of government agencies assigned to the 16 infrastructure segments. A program calls for ‘voluntary’ adoption in the private sector.
5) (Brown & Westaway, 2011) This paper presents an integrated approach to incorporate multiple human-centered perspectives of resilience impacting complex environmental change systems. Socio-ecological system concepts such as diversity, uncertainty, adaptive capacity, self-organization, and applications like community resilience are introduced.
Comments