Catastrophic events such as the Fukushima nuclear meltdown have intensified global interest in improving the resilience of electric power systems in East Asia. Defined as the ability to plan and prepare for, absorb, recover from, and adapt to threats, resilience represents the ability of engineered systems to take positive action under known and unknown stress. Recent corruption cases that caused the shutdown of multiple Korean nuclear power plants demonstrate that social dimensions such as management practices, public concern for nuclear power, and disaster protocols must be considered when measuring the resilience of the grid. However, resilience analysis of engineered systems often does not incorporate social dimensions and cannot measure disaster planning, preparation, or adaptation. Until a new method is developed that can link social and electric power infrastructure dynamics together, Korea's electric grid will remain fragile to disaster. This project seeks to create empirical network models of Korean institutions and electric power infrastructure to measure the resilience of the interdependent socio-infrastructure system. With resilience expert Dr. Jeryang Park at Hongik University, data about generation, transmission, and distribution infrastructure will be collected to create a network model of the Korean grid.
Korean resilience and electric power experts will be interviewed to create a network model of Korean electric power and disaster governance and management institutions. The models will be analyzed to determine their topological features that influence disaster planning and preparation, absorption, recovery, and adaptation. Furthermore, both models will be analyzed to determine interdependencies between social institutions and built infrastructure to identify resource and operations decisions that can reduce the impacts of future disasters. Overall, this project is a first step towards better analytical tools for resilience analysis and validated theories of coupled social-ecological-technological resilience. This NSF EAPSI award is funded in collaboration with National Research Foundation of Korea.
The purpose of this work is to study the resilience of electric power systems in South Korea (Korea hereafter). The intellectual goals of the project were to: (1) advance analytical models used to design resilient critical infrastructure systems, and (2) improve understanding of how organizational structures and interactions influence engineered infrastructure. The major activities of the project can be summarized in four separate categories: data collection, model development, framework development, and education. While in Korea, technical and qualitative interview data was collected from electric grid and disaster management experts to develop network models of Korean electric power infrastructure and relevant organizations. The data collection activities supported the creation of three system models: (1) a model of how Korean disaster management and electric power organizations interact, (2) model of the Korean high voltage electric power transmission system, and (3) a model that relates Korean disaster management and electric power operations to the use of built infrastructure. Taken together, the data collection and model development activities supported the creation of a new framework for socio-technical systems modelling that was presented at the Urban Sustainability and Resilience Conference at University College London in 2014. The project also supported both the creation of an educational model on resilience for a combined undergraduate / graduate course at Arizona State University and a graduate-level course on resilience engineering. Moreover, several presentations were held at Korean and US universities to disseminate study findings to a broad audience. In addition to these broader impacts, the results from this project are also a foundational element of a current study on the resilience of critical infrastructure in Phoenix, AZ and Indianapolis, ID (NSF grant #1441352).
