Building resilience in virtual and physical networked operations

As society becomes increasingly networked, both physically and virtually, so do human operations. This change exposes a unique subset of challenges and risks associated with the intersection of systems and the potential for cascading failure. Yet existing risk and resilience dependency models fail to accommodate these complexities, potentially exposing the capabilities that infrastructure systems enable to catastrophic failure. This paper builds on operational resilience (OR) theory, to develop a theoretical framework for developing resilience in physical and virtual networks, the networked OR framework. The authors argue that risk tolerance and resilience is developed through the concept of a projected tableau which is well situated in the broader network context. An overview of resilience, networks and OR is provided, with an explanation of the networked OR concept, a revised framework for developing resilience in networks and application to an emergency services network.