Congratulations to five faculty members from Johns Hopkins University who, in conjunction with researchers at the University of Maryland and the University of Delaware, have received a Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Processes and Systems (RIPS) Award from National Science Foundation.
Judy Mitrani-Reiser, Matt Green, Helaine Rutkow, Tom Kirsch, and Jonathan Links were awarded a RIPS Award for their proposal titled, “Quantifying Disaster Resilience of Critical Infrastructure-based Societal Systems with Emergent Behavior and Dynamic Interdependencies.” Their project will create an analytical framework to quantify the resilience of critical infrastructure-based societal systems (CISSs) that are necessary for community functioning and will focus on the impact of a single or compound hazard events on CISSs. Examples of CISSs include, but are not limited to: a school district, a healthcare delivery system, government buildings, a university campus, hospitality facilities, a residential building stock or a central business district.
“How do all of these pieces connect and how does one piece affect the resilience of the entire health care system?” said Judy Mitrani-Reiser, the civil engineering professor who is leading the Johns Hopkins team. “We are trying to connect the vulnerabilities of the physical components to community outcomes through disruptions in services.”
The goal is to understand and model the mechanisms by which organizational behaviors emerge and evolve during a disaster event. In an emergency, CISSs require constant communication with a variety of entities – from doctors, nurses, and technicians to administrators, facilities managers, and janitors to emergency responders, policymakers, and suppliers of drugs, equipment, and food.
The project will incorporate public policy, organizational policy, emergent organizational behaviors and risk communication considerations to study the potential mechanisms for nonlinear escalation in damage impact evolution in cyber systems. The initial loss of system components due to physical damage can propagate across the CISS or its supporting lifelines as a result of interdependencies between system and subsystem elements.
For more information on the RIPS Award, visit http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2014/nsf14524/nsf14524.htm.