Over the past decade, resilience has emerged as a key orienting concept for evaluating critical infrastructure planning and investment decisions. Traditional risk management tends to be reductive and most typically some form of probabilistic analysis is used to quantify risk to determine what issues are prioritised. The concept of resilience is more strongly founded on the notion that the future is uncertain and that the outcome of decisions made today will be impacted by complex socio-technical processes that occur over time. It requires us to develop capacity to respond to and recover from shocks and stresses; these efforts are just as important as preventing an event from happening in the first instance. This talk will provide a review the evolving field of critical infrastructure resilience analysis and, through a case study of flood recovery in Australia, it will outline how complexity science provides a valuable framework for future development in infrastructure resilience assessment.

Developments in resilience assessment of critical infrastructure systems and future direction through complexity science