Abstract: Lifeline infrastructure systems have always been crucial to the social, economic, and military security of societies. Because lifeline systems are critical to societal coherence and economic operations, assessing and mitigating risks to lifeline system operations is crucial. However, attention has shifted from risk assessment to resilience assessment due to the exceptionally large adaptation and mitigation needs implied by the geographic and temporal scope of natural and man-made hazards. In resilience assessment, most research efforts have focused on defining and measuring resilience quantitatively. However, could it be possible that infrastructure resilience is driven by the properties of the networks of human relationships, operating protocols, evolving objectives and information sharing processes within infrastructure systems? In response to this question, the goal of this talk is to introduce the concept of protocol-driven resilience. Protocol-driven resilience refers to the way in which these networks interact to support system- level macro-cognitive functions and produce resilient system behavior. In this talk, I describe preliminary results from ongoing research we are conducting in order to investigate how the concept of protocol-driven resilience enhances our understanding of lifeline infrastructure system resilience.

Bio: Dr. Royce Francis is an associate professor in the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering. His work is at the intersection of the application of statistical methods to infrastructure and environmental risk problems, decision analytic research, and policy-focused research. Dr. Francis has conducted sponsored research in the areas of drinking water system asset management, decision structuring for low impact development investments, and resilience analysis of infrastructure systems. Dr. Francis’s research has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the DC Water Resources Research Institute [a United States Geological Survey sponsored Institute], and DC Water.