Improving inter-infrastructural resilience of interconnected critical infrastructure services by strengthening requisite variety capability of operational actors

Today, infrastructure systems are interconnected, resulting in uncertainty and vulnerability beyond own assets. The uncertainty in interorganizational operations shifts the role of operational actors away from their role as assumed in traditional work designs, considering these actors as merely executers of a predefined plan. Research in the context of complex temporary technical operations (CTTOs) illustrates how interconnected and concurrent operations pose challenges that call on interorganizational operational actors' distributed understanding to assess situations that arise at the intersections of disciplinary areas. It illustrates how these actors apply a temporary interorganizational resilience capability (TIRC) to deal with synchronizing activities, trade-offs, and continuous manoeuvrability. Based on disaster management research suggesting the potential of TIRC in a scenario following an M9 earthquake in the United States' Pacific Northwest, this paper discusses its potential to strengthen requisite variety, the capability to match real-time task demands with immediate available resources across interconnected infrastructures pre-disaster.

Keywords: Restoration Resilience, Restoration Capability, Requisite Variety, Pre-disaster, Temporary Interorganizational Resilience Capability, TIRC, Operation, Interconnected Infrastructure System, Uncertainty.