Resilience Engineering

In the last decade, resilience has emerged as a concept for better understanding the performance of systems, especially their behavior during and after the occurrence of disturbances, e.g. unexpected natural hazards or technical failures. From an operational point of view, a resilient approach can be defined as the ability of a system to withstand an unexpected harmful change or a disruptive event by reducing the initial negative impacts, by adapting itself to them and by recovering from them in a timely and cost-effective way.

In order to tackle emerging technological, environmental, geopolitical, economic risks, RINA is able to help Clients in preventing, promptly detecting, timely responding to and cost-effectively recovering from disruptions, such as those caused by man-made events, global changes and natural disasters by increasing the resilience of their strategic and critical assets, within a systemic approach across various levels (from strategic to operational) and phases of the asset life-cycle (from planning, to design, up to operation and maintenance).

Spanning from the design of technological solutions to the development of policy and user’s recommendations, moving through hazards identification, risk and vulnerability assessment, up to the definition of assets protection strategies, we embrace our engineering capabilities to support private companies, public bodies and governmental institutions ensuring operational efficiency and business as well as service continuity.

Resilience Engineering Service

The service is delivered via the design, implementation and deployment of Resilience Plans (RPs) whose key features are the following.

• Tailor-made to the Client most likely risks, threats and scenarios
• Encapsulate Client’s Business Continuity and Emergency plans
• Provide sensitivity analyses of Client’s critical processes and functions
• Incorporate Vulnerability analyses and Exposure assessments
• Provide estimations, via Key Performance Indicators, of resilience capabilities (Plan/Prepare, Absorb, Recover, Adapt), in terms of Reliability, Robustness, Redundancy and Resourcefulness
• Include analyses, modelling and simulations of interdependencies among assets and infrastructures, as well as estimations of the impact of cascading effects
• Use cost-benefits criteria to identify optimal actions for resilience keeping or improving

Therefore, the Resilience Plans (RPs) can assist the client in:

• Planning ahead by understanding the implications of most- likely or future scenarios;
• Adapting and controlling by analysing cascading effects and their propagation);
• Recovering timely and efficiently from the minimum performance level;
• Restoring effectively the business or service continuity by combining restoration strategies and asset management approaches.

Resilience Engineering benefits

The main benefits the Client can gain are:

• Increase of asset performance and profitability;
• Reduction of losses and preservation of the business or service continuity;
• Reduction of costs and time of recovery in case of an event;
• Increase of safety and reduction of human errors;
• Improvement of awareness on risks, threats, and scenario, supporting planning and decision making.

Why RINA

Thanks to a multidisciplinary team and cross-sectorial approach, building on solid, established and widely recognised foundations and expertise RINA can support the Clients in defining, developing, applying and making operational resilient principles, no matter of the type of risk they are experiencing and of the sector of application. As such RINA provides in unique interface a complete technical advisor service on Resilience.

In the area of Resilience Engineering, two main application areas have been identified as strategic for us, due to market evidence and company expertise: Critical Infrastructure Resilience (e.g. Energy, Transport, Water, Health, Finance, Information and Communication Critical Infrastructure) and Disaster Resilience (e.g. man-made events such as sabotage, intentional and unintentional attacks, etc. and natural events such as earthquakes, floods, landslides, wildfires, heavy precipitation, windstorms, etc.).