Paul Schulman and Emery Roe
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780804793933
- eISBN:
- 9780804798624
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804793933.001.0001
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Organization Studies
High-reliability management of critical infrastructures-the safe and continued provision of electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, transportation, and water-is a social imperative. Loss of ...
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High-reliability management of critical infrastructures-the safe and continued provision of electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, transportation, and water-is a social imperative. Loss of service in interconnected critical infrastructure systems (ICISs) after hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and tsunamis and their delayed large-scale recovery have turned these events into catastrophes. Reliability and Risk reveals a neglected management dimension and provides a new framework for understanding interconnected infrastructures, their potential for cascading failure, and how to improve their reliability and reduce risk of system failure. The book answers two questions: How are modern interconnected infrastructures managed and regulated for reliability? How can policy makers, analysts, managers, and citizenry better promote reliability in interconnected systems whose failures can scarcely be imagined? The current consensus is that the answers lie in better design, technology, and regulation, but the book argues that these have inevitable shortfalls and that it is dangerous to stop there. The framework developed in Reliability and Risk draws from first-of-its-kind research at the infrastructure crossroads of California, the California Delta, in the San Francisco Bay region. The book demonstrates that infrastructure reliability in an interconnected world must be managed by system professionals in real time.Less
High-reliability management of critical infrastructures-the safe and continued provision of electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, transportation, and water-is a social imperative. Loss of service in interconnected critical infrastructure systems (ICISs) after hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and tsunamis and their delayed large-scale recovery have turned these events into catastrophes. Reliability and Risk reveals a neglected management dimension and provides a new framework for understanding interconnected infrastructures, their potential for cascading failure, and how to improve their reliability and reduce risk of system failure. The book answers two questions: How are modern interconnected infrastructures managed and regulated for reliability? How can policy makers, analysts, managers, and citizenry better promote reliability in interconnected systems whose failures can scarcely be imagined? The current consensus is that the answers lie in better design, technology, and regulation, but the book argues that these have inevitable shortfalls and that it is dangerous to stop there. The framework developed in Reliability and Risk draws from first-of-its-kind research at the infrastructure crossroads of California, the California Delta, in the San Francisco Bay region. The book demonstrates that infrastructure reliability in an interconnected world must be managed by system professionals in real time.
Emery Roe and Paul R. Schulman
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780804793933
- eISBN:
- 9780804798624
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804793933.003.0007
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Organization Studies
This chapter expands the discussion of how time and scale interact with risk when managing infrastructures for reliability. The whole cycle of infrastructure operations ranges from normal to ...
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This chapter expands the discussion of how time and scale interact with risk when managing infrastructures for reliability. The whole cycle of infrastructure operations ranges from normal to disrupted, restored, failed, recovered, and new normal. Risks vary by the stage of the cycle, and each stage is managed for reliability differently. Thus, a disruption in one infrastructure of an ICIS requires not only zooming down to determine root causes but also zooming up to determine its impact on the entire infrastructure as a system and zooming across to determine how these impacts affect infrastructures interconnected with it. Two examples-the 2010 San Bruno gas explosion and the major nexus of infrastructure on an island in the Delta-illustrate how risk analysis is to be undertaken in the ICIS setting.Less
This chapter expands the discussion of how time and scale interact with risk when managing infrastructures for reliability. The whole cycle of infrastructure operations ranges from normal to disrupted, restored, failed, recovered, and new normal. Risks vary by the stage of the cycle, and each stage is managed for reliability differently. Thus, a disruption in one infrastructure of an ICIS requires not only zooming down to determine root causes but also zooming up to determine its impact on the entire infrastructure as a system and zooming across to determine how these impacts affect infrastructures interconnected with it. Two examples-the 2010 San Bruno gas explosion and the major nexus of infrastructure on an island in the Delta-illustrate how risk analysis is to be undertaken in the ICIS setting.