Resilience of Critical Infrastructures: Review and Analysis of Current Approaches

In crisis situations, systems, organizations, and people must react and deal with events that are inherently unpredictable before they occur: vital societal functions and thus infrastructures must be restored or adapted as quickly as possible. This capacity refers to resilience. Progress concerning its conceptualization has been made but it remains difficult to assess and apply in practice. The results of this article stem from a literature review allowing the analysis of current advances in the development of proposals to improve the management of infrastructure resilience. The article: (i) identifies different dimensions of resilience; (ii) highlights current limits of assessing and controlling resilience; and (iii) proposes several directions for future research that could go beyond the current limits of resilience management, but subject to compliance with a number of constraints. These constraints are taking into account different hazards, cascade effects, and uncertain conditions, dealing with technical, organizational, economical, and human domains, and integrating temporal and spatial aspects.