Critical Infrastructures Resilience: Policy and Engineering Principles

This text offers comprehensive and principled, yet practical, guidelines to critical infrastructures resilience. Extreme events and stresses, including those that may be unprecedented but are no longer surprising, have disproportionate effects on critical infrastructures and hence on communities, cities, and megaregions.

Critical infrastructures include buildings and bridges, dams, levees, and sea walls, as well as power plants and chemical factories, besides lifeline networks such as multimodal transportation, power grids, communication, and water or wastewater. The growing interconnectedness of natural-built-human systems causes cascading infrastructure failures and necessitates simultaneous recovery. This text explores the new paradigm centered on the concept of resilience by approaching the challenges posed by globalization, climate change, and growing urbanization on critical infrastructures and key resources through the combination of policy and engineering perspectives. It identifies solutions that are scientifically credible, data driven, and sound in engineering principles while concurrently informed by and supportive of social and policy imperatives.

Critical Infrastructures Resilience will be of interest to students of engineering and policy.

Auroop Ratan Ganguly is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Sustainability and Data Sciences Laboratory at Northeastern University. He has nearly 20 years' total work experience spanning the R&D organizations of Oracle Corporation and a best-of-breed company acquired by Oracle, as a senior scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and within academia in multiple roles. His current research is at the intersection weather or climate extremes and water, infrastructural resilience and homeland security, as well as machine learning, statistics, and nonlinear dynamics. He has led or co-led projects worth about $19 million funded by NSF, NASA, DHS, DOE, DOD, and other agencies.

Udit Bhatia is a PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. His research interests include infrastructure resilience, ecosystem recovery, climate, and hydrology. Previously, he served as Assistant Design Engineer (Structures) in MECON Ltd. (Government of India Enterprise). He was the founder of a successful engineering startup, the educational wing of which developed learning modules delivered to students through remote technologies and face-to-face interactions.

Stephen E. Flynn is Professor of Political Science and Founding Director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University. Dr Flynn served as President of the Center for National Policy and as senior fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is one of the world’s leading experts on critical infrastructure and supply chain security and resilience. He is a member of the Homeland Security Science and Technology Advisory Council.