Implementing societal values as drivers for performance indicators to improve resilience analysis of critical infrastructures

Abstract

The resilience of critical infrastructures is assessed with key performance indicators that are unavoidably based on the underlying societal values of the stakeholders. Though societal values are under constant change and critically determine the resilience management of critical infrastructures they are difficult to consider in decision-making approaches. This research presents a proof-of-concept approach to highlight the relevance of societal values for decision-making and resilience management. Previous research proposed to use abstract worldviews to solve the complex decision problem presented by the lake model, a human and nature coupled system model simulating the intricacy of societal decision problems and providing scenarios for research on decision-making under uncertainty. By replacing the abstract worldviews with a reduced set of societal values we establish a formalized relationship between the societal values and the lake model. We show that even slight changes in the societal values can lead to significantly different behavior of the lake model. Though the approach is extremely simplified it serves to highlight the sensitivity of decision problems to societal value changes.