NPS Researchers Lead a New Project on Infrastructure Resilience at Military Installations

NPS Researchers Lead a New Project on Infrastructure Resilience at Military Installations

By Dan Eisenberg, PhD, Department of Operations Researh, NPS

DoD services seek a better understanding of compound threats to interdependent infrastructure systems on their installations. Military services view infrastructure resilience broadly as a critical system that can, “take a punch, stay standing, and punch back" (MCICOM 2019). This corresponds to the capacity for infrastructure systems to survive events that threaten mission readiness, continue to function and recover in the immediate aftermath of an event for up to 14 days, and adapt to project combat power into the future. All DoD services have similar, lofty goals for infrastructure resilience.

Researchers from the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Infrastructure Defense (CID) and the Energy Academic Group (EAG) are now leading efforts to measure infrastructure vulnerabilities and help make military installations more resilient. The new team led by Dr.
Daniel Eisenberg of the CID is comprised of experts across multiple departments including Operations Research and Systems Engineering. They are funded by the Office of the Secretary of Defense Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program to conduct research for the next three years.

The cross-campus team is focused on developing models that measure the vulnerability of installation infrastructure systems and use these measurements to guide service-wide infrastructure investment and protection. DoD resilience goals align with a broader need across the DoD to understand how the loss of interdependent infrastructure services affects mission readiness. For example, mission critical water, communications, mobility, and food systems often rely on backup generators and uninterruptible power supplies to operate during blackouts. However, these backup systems may fail when needed and are not necessarily designed for 14 days of continuous operation. Mission readiness requires the recovery and functioning of electricity distribution systems, which themselves may rely on interdependent services like water for cooling, communications for control systems, and fuel trucks for operation. Together, the vulnerability of any infrastructure system directly impacts operations and management of all other critical systems.

Currently, there is no standard way to integrate multiple models of electric power, water, transportation, telecommunications, and related systems for resilience analysis. This means there is no way to measure interdependent vulnerabilities and cascading effects. One goal of the project is to develop a standard architecture and runtime infrastructure to federate models used to measure real-world infrastructure operations together and assess their interdependencies. Using this model architecture, Eisenberg and his team plan to develop computational and optimization-based methods for identifying worst-case disruptions in interdependent systems.

Relating system models to service-wide infrastructure investments requires translating measures of vulnerability into measures of infrastructure readiness and installation mission needs. Infrastructure readiness across the DoD is determined by two key performance indicators—the facility condition index (FCI), measuring infrastructure quality and condition and the mission dependency index (MDI), measuring the importance of an asset or facility to military missions. While FCI helps decision-makers understand the likelihood that military infrastructure will survive extreme events like hurricanes, MDI is more relevant for resilience by capturing the capability for infrastructure services to adapt to compound threats.

Eisenberg and his team plan to support DoD resilience goals by linking MDI to the new understanding of infrastructure vulnerability gained through interdependent models. Existing methods for calculating MDI all stem from work by the Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC 2018). To calculate MDI for a given infrastructure asset, expert opinion determines how interruptible, relocatable, or replaceable an infrastructure service is within a single facility and among interdependent facilities. The new team at NPS will build on these aspects of MDI—service interruptibility, relocateability, and replaceability—and relate them to worst-case failure assessment methods.

LEARN MORE
Email Dan Eisenberg at daniel.eisenberg@nps.edu or call 831-656-2358

Notes:

Marine Corps Installation Command (MCICOM) 2019, “Installation Next: Hawaii-Resilience Symposium Report.”

Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) 2018, “CNIC INSTRUCTION 11100.1A: Mission Dependency Index.”