Organizational and technical approaches have proven successful in increasing the performance and preventing risks at socio-technical systems at all scales. Nevertheless, damaging events are often unavoidable due to a wide and dynamic threat landscape and enabled by the increasing complexity of modern systems. For overall performance and risk control at the system level, resilience can be a versatile option, in particular for reducing resources needed for system development, maintenance, reuse, or disposal. This paper presents a framework for a resilience assessment and management process that builds on existing risk management practice before, during, and after potential and real events. It leverages tabular and matrix correlation methods similar as standardized in the field of risk analysis to fulfill the step-wise resilience assessment and management for critical functions of complex systems. We present data needs for the method implementation and output generation, in particular regarding the assessment of threats and the effects of counter measures. Also included is a discussion of how the results contribute to the advancement of functional risk control and resilience enhancement at system level as well as related practical implications for its efficient implementation. The approach is applied in the domains telecommunication, gas networks, and indoor localization systems. Results and implications are further discussed.
The wide range of unmanned aerial system (UAS) applications has led to a substantial increase in their numbers, giving rise to a whole new area of systems aiming at detecting and/or mitigating their potentially unauthorized activities. The majority of these proposed solutions for countering the aforementioned actions (C-UAS) include radar/RF/EO/IR/acoustic sensors, usually working in coordination. This work introduces a small UAS (sUAS) acoustic detection system based on an array of microphones, easily deployable and with moderate cost. It continuously collects audio data and enables (a) the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation of the most prominent incoming acoustic signal by implementing a straightforward algorithmic process similar to triangulation and (b) identification, i.e., confirmation that the incoming acoustic signal actually emanates from a UAS, by exploiting sound spectrograms using machine-learning (ML) techniques. Extensive outdoor experimental sessions have validated this system’s efficacy for reliable UAS detection at distances exceeding 70 m.
Communications play a fundamental role in the economic and social well-being of the citizens and on operations of most of the critical infrastructures (CIs). Extreme weather events, natural disasters and criminal attacks represent a challenge due to their increase in frequency and intensity requiring smarter resilience of the Communication CIs, which are extremely vulnerable due to the ever-increasing complexity of the architecture also in light of the evolution towards 5G, the extensive use of programmable platforms and exponential growth of connected devices. In this paper, we present the aim of RESISTO H2020 EU-funded project, which constitutes an innovative solution for Communication CIs holistic situation awareness and enhanced resilience.