Infrastructure resilience assessment through control design

Infrastructure resilience is a priority for homeland security in many nations around the globe. This paper describes a new approach for quantitatively assessing the resilience of critical infrastructure systems. The mathematics of optimal control design provides the theoretical foundation for this methodology. This foundation enables the inclusion of recovery costs within the resilience assessment approach, a unique capability for quantitative resilience assessment techniques. This paper describes the formulation of the optimal control problem for a set of representative infrastructure models. This example demonstrates the importance of recovery costs in quantitative resilience analysis, and the increased capability provided by this approach’s ability to discern between varying levels of resilience.