Evaluating the resilience of critical infrastructures assessing interdependencies and economic impact: the role of inventories

摘要

The input-output approach proposed by Wassily Leontief is regarded as a key tool for the quantitative analysis of the interdependencies between different interconnected sectors within an economy, especially in today's highly interactive networks of producers/service providers. In recent years, Leontief's model was also extended in order to assess their resilience to critical events, such as a disruption affecting some sectors and propagating through others according to their vulnerability, reaction times and cen-trality to the overall economy. In this context, a key factor towards the mitigation of monetary losses is represented by preparedness, which is associated to a large extent to the availability of inventories, able to ensure extended continuity of product/service delivery in spite of the temporary partial or complete inoperability of some sectors. Building on an approach based on the dynamic inoperability input-output model with inventory, originally proposed in (Barker and Santos 2010), in this paper we formulate an optimization problem and propose an algorithm to determine how a proper sizing of each sector's cumulative inventory level can enhance the overall resilience to selected critical events.