Critical national infrastructures, including energy, transport, digital communications, and water, are prone to flood damage. Their geographical extent is a determinant of, and is determined by, patterns of human development, which is often concentrated in floodplains. It is important to understand how infrastructure systems react to large‐scale flooding. In this paper, we present an integrated framework for critical infrastructure flood impact assessment. Within this integrated framework, we represent interdependent infrastructure assets through spatial network models. We quantify infrastructure flood impacts in terms of disrupted customers linked directly to flood assets and customers disrupted indirectly due to network effects. The analysis shows how spatial network models inform flood risk management practitioners to identify and compare critical infrastructures risks on flooded and non‐flooded land, for prioritising flood protection investments and improve resilience of cities. A case study of the Thames catchment in England is presented, which contains key infrastructure assets and highest population concentrations in United Kingdom.

The economy and well-being of modern societies relies on complex and interdependent infrastructure systems to enable delivery of utilities and movement of goods, people and services. This complexity has resulted in an increased potential for cascading failures, whereby small scale initial failures in one system can result in events of catastrophic proportions across the wider network. Resilience and the emerging concept of resilience engineering within infrastructure are among the main concerns of those managing such complex systems. However, the disparate nature of resilience engineering development in various academic and industrial regimes has resulted in a diversity of definitions and characterisations. These are discussed in this paper, as are the commonalities between sectors and between different engineering disciplines. The paper also highlights the various methodologies used as part of resilience engineering implementation and monitoring, current practices including existing approaches and metrics, and an insight into the opportunities and potential barriers associated with these methodologies and practices. This research was undertaken for the Resilience Shift initiative to shift the approach to resilience in practice for critical infrastructure sectors. The programme aims to help practitioners involved in critical infrastructure to make decisions differently, contributing to a safer and better world.