Panel: Resilience in Urban and Critical Infrastructures - The Role of Pervasive Computing

Abstract

An infrastructure is called critical (CRITIS) if its disruption poses a severe threat to public life. Electricity and water are commonly cited examples, but the list comprises the food supply chain, the public health system, and more. During the recent pandemics, videoconferencing, home office / schooling, and global virus data dashboards made the public aware of how dependent we have become on "the Internet", or rather on ICT (information and communication technology): ICT has truly become a CRITIS. Not only that: ICT is becoming ever more important for the correct functioning of all other infrastructures: finance is already fully dependent on ICT, food and health supply are organized using ICT, even the upcoming smart (power) grid uses ICT as its ‘nervous system’. The most frightening aspect in this trend is the fact that ICT is known, from both everyday experience and serious studies, to be fragile i.e. vulnerable and for the most part rather unreliable. Nobody wants to picture a future with electricity ‘crashing/rebooting’ twice a day, being unavailable due to software updates, flickering due to congestion, being heavily affected by various hazards, or becoming unavailable for days due to cyberattacks. This is why the ICT that functions as the ‘nervous system’ of the power grid, and of any other CRITIS, must be resilient: Resilient means-roughly speaking-undisturbed by mild and medium-scale harm; continuing to function, at least in an emergency mode, even after serious damage; fast-recovering; and learning from (real or modelled/simulated) emergencies ‘experienced’.