Optimal Management Strategies and Tactics

The management of critical infrastructure systems typically relies on rules of thumb instead of mathematical optimisation techniques to identify the best possible solution. Assuming that budget constraints worsen in the future, we must improve the cost-effectiveness of decisions at several levels: operations, governance, and the institutional framework.

The Optimal Management Strategies and Tactics research module aims to:

1. identify the most cost-effective strategies and tactics for system improvements through mathematical means
2. allow early detection of unexpected disruptions and regime shifts using real-time system data
3. develop risk-informed policy-making approaches as an alternative to incentive regulation

The prediction of uncertainties based on stochastic random variables with known probability distributions and correlations often provides weak predictions of critical infrastructure systems disruption. The Optimisation of Systems for Robustness submodule aims to overcome the weaknesses of mathematical optimisation, simulation, and of stochastic and dynamic programming approaches by developing a scalable and rigorous approach for network-modelling to describe, analyse and optimise critical infrastructure systems.

The Infrastructure Systems Risk Monitoring, Detection, and Control submodule approaches system protection as a control problem, that is, either to pin a system to a favourable status, or to find an optimal control approach to drive a system back to its normal region. Researchers will develop novel monitoring schemes for complex networks, including develop reaction and/or isolation schemes, and protection schemes based on real-time systems control.

The Infrastructure Policy Making as an Alternative to Incentive Regulation submodule seeks to make the communication and financial clearing infrastructure systems more reliable and robust. The two possible approaches to are: to constrain transaction flows ex-ante with design rules (structural remedies); and to influence the operation and use ex-ante with liability regimes or disincentives (behavioural remedies). The study aims to determine whether the structural or behavioural remedy is more effective, based on a comparative analysis of different jurisdictions in Switzerland, Singapore, the European Union, and the United States.