FRS links resilience, reliability, asset management

The World Congress on Resilience, Reliability and Asset Management took place in Singapore during 29-30 July. It stems from the success of the International Conference on Infrastructure Resilience 2018, organised by the Future Resilient Systems and the ETH Risk Centre.

The congress in 2019 converges with the International Conference on Reliability Systems Engineering organised by Beihang University, and the World Congress on Engineering Asset Management organised by the International Society of Engineering Asset Management.

The meeting of different bodies of knowledge brings scientists, policymakers, and practitioners together to share insights on resilience, asset management, reliability modelling and analysis, and safety analysis and modelling.

“Research breakthroughs often occur at the margins of the disciplines, where they are not expected, says Professor Hans Heinimann, co-chair of the congress and past director of the Future Resilient Systems programme at the Singapore-ETH Centre.

Professor Joseph Mathew, CEO of the Asset Institute, says that asset management is closely related to resilience as it is interested in the service delivery potential of assets and is therefore concerned with reducing risk, improving resilience and the social interactions associated with these assets.

Social aspect of resilience

In his keynote speech, Professor Kazuo Furuta, director of the Resilience Engineering Research Centre at the University of Tokyo presents an integrated model of critical infrastructure. Established after the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima disaster in 2011, his centre focusses on the resilience of Japan, based on a human-centre analysis with strong emphasis on social systems. In addition to looking at the lifeline performance and level of service after a disruption, level of civil life is also considered. His proposed approach includes factors in the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, including physiological needs and social needs of the residents.

Prof Jose Emmanuel Ramirez-Marquez, Director of Enterprise Science and Engineering Division and Associate Professor at the School of Systems & Enterprises, Stevens Institute of Technology, agrees that we cannot look at resilience without considering the community. As cities are a conglomerate of hardware and communities of people, system resilience inevitably has a social impact.

Emerging technologies and impact on resilience

In his keynote speech, Professor David W. Coit presents how system reliability optimization has evolved with technological advances. With the proliferation of technology and of big data, system reliability optimisation is moving from a mathematical programming problem towards active reliability improvement. With this approach, it allows more dynamic modelling and the optimisation process can be customised to specific user groups. It also encourages closer interaction in the processes of system design and system recovery.

Mr Brandon Lee, Director of Product Strategy and Commercialisation, Intech Process Automation, also discusses the topic of digitalisation and the proliferation of data in his talk about smart asset management in the era of Industry 4.0, focussed on manufacturing. He proposes viewing manufacturing and intelligence as a service. With the development of a digital twin, service can be rendered remotely. Human-machine, machine-machine and machine-product interaction can therefore be enhanced.

Human-centric by design

A common theme at the conference, in addition to digitalisation and the social aspect, is the role of human in resilience. On the second day, Professor Heinimann moderates a panel on the impact of digitalisation on resilience. “Computers have no objectives, no goals and no values,” he says. Therefore, these need to be defined.

In the subsequent discussions, many participants echo that human knowledge is needed to convert data to wisdom, such as to develop data architecture and for data governance. One participant states, “We need to know the problem before we try to solve it. And the knowledge of the problem is embedded in the social systems. Therefore we need to understand the process of motivation, behaviour and knowledge management.”

Mr Patrick Lieser from the Darmstadt University of Technology sums up this idea with the proposal of resilience by design, whereby resilience is built into the system at the design stage.