Abstract: This paper presents a study where nine Swedish citizens were interviewed about their concerns and expectations, from a customer perspective, in relation to a 10 day disruption in the payment system. The purpose of the study was to understand the customer?s perspective in order to provide input to the development of a simulation environment. This simulation environment aims at allowing different stakeholders to experience how a disruption in the payment system affects the local community and thereby create understanding of how resilience is built and affected. The research questions were: What do customers expect to get access to? When? What are customers prepared for? How does this differ among different customer groups? The results indicate some understanding of how such a crisis affects the local community and what the informants expects to happen. The respondents represented a diversity of socio-economic backgrounds from rural and urban parts of the municipality.

Abstract: Following two Major Incident Reviews and a request from WA's governing emergency management body, DFES WA acknowledged that their incident management processes were not supporting seamless communication and collaboration. After identifying their unique needs, DFES implemented two web-enabled platforms: WebEOC, a Crisis Information Management System and Whispir, a multichannel notifications solution. Both systems offer DFES and, in turn, WA communities a level of transparency, collaboration and accuracy not previously available. Recently, six of WA's key government agencies have connected their WebEOC platforms via a single information hub. Through this, they can share and disseminate crucial information within a common operating picture, have complete situational awareness, and rapidly and intelligently prepare for and respond to incidents. WA is the first Australian state to have such a platform implemented and, through these efforts, its agencies are ensuring increased efficiency, collaboration and resiliency for themselves and the wider WA population.

Abstract: Mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery are the four phases of emergency management that have arguably been unchanged since their inception nearly 43 years ago. This paper proposes to replace recovery with adaptation as the post incident phase of emergency management. Recovery focuses on a return to normal while adaptation better encompasses acknowledgement, healing, strengthening, and improving quality of life for a more resilient outcome. This paper reviews seminal work within emergency management and work pertaining to other types of adaptation to better comprehend adaptation as applied to emergency management.

Abstract: Recent studies have called attention to the improvement of “collaborative resilience” by fostering the collaboration potentials of public and private stakeholders during disasters. With our research we consider real and virtual volunteers in order to detect conditions for cooperation among those citizen groups through social media. Therefore we analysed the usage of Twitter during a tornado crisis to look for role patterns and aspects that helped volunteer groups in the virtual to emerge, and matched the data with an interview study on experiences, attitudes, concerns and potentials professional emergency services recounted in the emergence of volunteer groups in the real. While virtual groups seem to easily form and collaborate, the engagement of real volunteers is decreasing according to the perception of professionals. We discuss the dynamics in both tendencies and suggest design implications (use of existing social networks, promotion and awareness, connection among volunteers, connection to emergency services and systems) to support both types of volunteer groups, which lead to a software prototype.

Abstract: Continuity of Operations (COOP) planning helps ensure that municipal agencies maintain essential functions when disasters threaten critical infrastructures. COOP planning is especially important for Public-Safety Answering Points (PSAPs), which must continue to answer 911 calls and dispatch first responders during crises. However, COOP planning guidelines often focus on threats to cyber-physical infrastructures rather than outbreaks of infectious disease that threaten the human work arrangements—social infrastructures—agencies rely on to perform essential functions. This study reports preliminary findings from interviews with U.S. PSAP officials who developed plans to decentralize 911 facilities, networks, and personnel to maintain essential functions during the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings suggest revisions to COOP planning guidelines that consider requirements for redundant, diverse, and interdependent cyber-physical-social infrastructures.

Abstract: This paper presents findings from an interdisciplinary research effort studying community resilience in Boulder, Colorado. Boulder is a progressive region with a history of environmental leadership. The area is currently in the process of recovering from major flooding and has launched several new initiatives related to building long-term resilience to natural disasters and other stressors. In our research, we consider the stakeholders involved in building local resilience as well as the different and often contradictory framings of the concept. This study takes a phenomenological and inductive approach to understanding resilience. In contrast to more reductionist frameworks that are frequently offered, we argue that this allows for greater understanding of the polyvocal and emergent qualities of resilience.

Abstract: Our research reflects an emerging shift in understandings of effective preparedness practices from siloed approaches toward more holistic views. We trace a shifting perspective emerging in literature and present in the early qualitative data of current preparedness experts' interviews within an international humanitarian organization whose core mission is disaster preparedness and response. Designing effective information systems for disaster preparedness requires us to better understand the dynamic and implicit ways practitioners define effective work. Our pilot research begins to uncover preparedness experts' perspectives, with plans for the study to investigate how preparedness practitioners view, conduct, and evaluate their work at the lowest-level1. Our long-term research goal is to realize implications for the more effective design of tools and systems to support disaster preparedness.

Abstract: The generation and supply of electricity is currently about to undergo a fundamental transition that includes extensive development of smart grids. Smart grids are huge and complex networks consisting of a vast number of devices and entities which are connected with each other. This fact opens new variations of disruption scenarios which can increase the vulnerability of a power distribution network. However, the network topology of a smart grid has significant effects on urban resilience particularly referring to the adequate provision of vital services of critical infrastructures. An elaborated topology of smart grids can increase urban resilience. In this paper, we discuss the role of smart grids, give research impulses for examining diverse smart grid topologies and for evaluating their impacts on urban resilience by using an agent based simulation approach which considers smart grid topology as a model parameter.

Abstract: Increasing resilience is a core interest in critical infrastructure (CI) protection that involves many challenges. It is necessary to agree on a common understanding of resilience and identify potential strategies to improve it.
Once this is done, the question arises how to choose among these strategies. We propose to decide based on a game-theoretic framework that allows identification of optimal actions under various scenarios. This framework considers different threat scenarios as attacks to the CI and the identified strategies to improve resilience as defense strategies for the CI. Since the payoff of the game, namely the resilience of the CI, can hardly be measured with certainty we choose an extension of classical game theory that allows taking uncertainty into account and still finds provably optimal solutions. This approach is especially useful in a situation where we aim to optimize a quantity that is difficult to measure (such as resilience). The result of this analysis is two-fold: it identifies an optimal defense but also provides information about the resilience in the worst case. The approach is illustrated with a small example using a publicly available implementation.

Abstract: With the current international crises such as the Ukrainian war, the ongoing climate change, or the interruptions in international supply chains and recent incidents like the earthquake in Turkey or the Ohio train derailment, it becomes more obvious that “just” protecting the society’s critical services and infrastructures will not be sufficient enough in the future. Services and infrastructures need to become more resilient to the effects of intentional threats as well as disasters caused by natural hazards to keep essential services operational and protect the people’s wellbeing. Accordingly, the solutions for achieving that and making society more resilient need to look further, beyond the boundaries of one infrastructure and beyond purely technical aspects. In this way, evolving towards a resilient society is a multi-dimensional problem integrating different viewpoints. In the technology-driven world we are living today, the social relations and interactions among individuals have become more important than ever and organizational structures influence the success or failure of technological solutions. Furthermore, many frameworks for societal/social/community resilience include as a metric the availability of essential services/critical infrastructure. Therefore, today’s technical solutions for protecting Critical Infrastructures need to play together with novel organizational, communal, and individual concepts as well as fulfill requirements from the economic, environmental, ethical and societal domains. In this panel, we will look at the impacts Critical Infrastructures are facing due to current crisis situations in different parts of the world and the effects this has on society. We will discuss among the panelists and with the audience on how existing and future concepts, methodologies and tools could help to improve resilience from a technical, organizational, and societal perspective.

Abstract: Information systems that support crisis responders and disaster risk management efforts are complex sociotechnical phenomena comprised of human capacities and relationships, data and software tools. Research in crisis informatics has highlighted the ways in which emergent groups of digital volunteers, or volunteer technical communities, have mobilized during disaster events to support information management efforts. This paper describes an action research project to support the creation of an ex ante volunteer technical community from among the potentially affected population in Kathmandu, Nepal, one of the most seismically at-risk cities in the world. In exploring this case, we argue that projects that attempt to create local open data ecosystems can be valuable but require investment in their design, execution and on-going maintenance.

Abstract: In this article, we want to present the concept for a risk management approach to assess the condition of critical infrastructure networks within metropolitan areas, their interdependencies among each other and the potential cascading effects. In contrast to existing solutions, this concept aims at providing a holistic view on the variety of interconnected networks within a city and the complex dependencies among them. Therefore, stochastic models and simulations are integrated into risk management to improve the assessment of cascading effects and support decision makers in crisis situations. This holistic view will allow risk managers at the city administration as well as emergency organizations to understand the full consequences of an incident and plan mitigation actions accordingly. Additionally, the approach will help to further strengthen the resilience of the entire city as well as the individual critical infrastructures in crisis situations.