Opportunities of Achieving Telecommunication Lifeline Systems Resilience

摘要

This paper attempts to identify the elements that lead to defining the resilience goal. The intent is not to provide solutions but identify elements to be considered in developing resilience. There are multiple means of solving an issue. It all depends on the boundary conditions of the issue. The intent is to influence decision and policy makers to consider supporting engineers to deal with building resilience to reduce community hardship in a post disaster situation. In addition to lifeline system robustness to withstand stress and quickness returning to normal operating mode, welfare of lifeline systems users have to be integrated into the approaches and processes to resilience. The users include other lifeline system operators-lifeline interdependency. Lifeline interdependence is an essential part of an integrated approach to reach the resilience goal. It is a reasonable starting point to create a balanced approach to achieve resilience. With climate change taking a firm hold, the lifeline systems are experiencing more interruptions more often by severe weather disasters such as flood. Lifeline systems engineers and operators are being challenged, which actually created opportunities for them to deal with both improving mitigation and speed of recovery. This is added to their normal tasks of maintenance, equipment upgrades, and components repairs and changes due to aging.