Efficiency versus Resilience in Critical Infrastructure Beyond the Trade-off
Abstract
Critical Infrastructure assets and systems enable the functioning of society, including commerce, governance, and public health. These systems vital to our way of life as humans are vulnerable to natural disasters, and their loss of functionality during and after the natural disasters hamper recovery efforts in other sectors. Improved resilience of these infrastructures is necessary but often leads to a loss of efficiency due to the associated costs. While important due to increasing demand for limited resources, improved efficiency in these infrastructures’ operations adversely affects resilience due to associated cost-cutting and operational capacity stretching. A system dynamics model previously used to investigate a hospital’s resilience to natural hazards is expanded to include variables to indicate its efficiency. Hypothetical scenarios with efficiency and resilience improvement strategies are simulated on the model to determine their impact on the hospital’s overall performance (efficiency and resilience). The model was used to demonstrate the trade-off and identify the system drivers of performance. An understanding of these drivers influenced the design of strategies to improve overall performance when faced with the efficiency: resilience trade-off. These simulations show that greater benefit can be derived when investments are made towards efficiency and resilience compared to focusing on one of them. The results also show that a combination of innovative managerial strategies that improve resource allocation and incorporate managerial flexibility to manage uncertainty, effectively mitigates the trade-off impacts. This investigation provides a framework for a performance-based measurement of resilience and efficiency in a hospital system and lays the groundwork for case study-based research.
Citation
Ozumba, Benjamin Chukwumdindu (2021). Efficiency versus Resilience in Critical Infrastructure Beyond the Trade-off. Master's thesis, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /195681.