Infrastructure Resilience in Emergency Situations

Dear Colleagues,

Modern societies are becoming increasingly dependent on reliable, safe, efficient, secure, and resilient infrastructures, i.e., systems able to produce and distribute essential goods and deliver services. Among these infrastructures, those with limited adaptive capacity and have large effects on preparedness, response, recovery, well-being, and economic stability are considered critical, e.g., telecommunications, power systems, transportation, water supply systems, emergency services, digital infrastructure, etc.

Resilience has become a dominant concept for understanding, analyzing, and managing such interdependent systems, which are usually regarded as complex and intractable, since their operation and performance emerge from diverse interactions within and outside a specific infrastructure.

This Special Issue aims to gather the state-of-the-art research and practices focusing on resilience management for infrastructure. More specifically, the Special Issue aims to descrive how to enhance infrastructure resilience in preparation and response to a wide range of emergency situations, both expected and unexpected. The Special Issue embraces a trans-disciplinary perspective, encompassing strategy, planning, operations, maintenance, and decision making in order to improve adaptive capacities and effective crisis management. Reviews on the research field and practices are also considered within the scope of the Issue.

The list of topics includes (but is not strictly limited to):

• Strategy and policy
• Maturity frameworks
• Interdependency analysis
• Empirical approaches
• Network-based approaches
• Functional modelling
• Storytelling
• Serious games, gamification
• System dynamics
• Human-made disasters
• Natural hazards
• Emergent technologies AI, ML, big data, drones
• Management of trade-offs
• Diverse perspectives on resilience

The main domains of interest (in particilar interdisciplinary research) are:

• Supply chain and manufacturing
• Transportation
• Telecommunication
• Water distribution
• Power systems
• Healthcare
• Communications
• Energy
• Construction
• Digital services

Dr. Riccardo Patriarca
Dr. Giulio Di Gravio
Dr. Gesa Praetorius
Dr. Ivonne A. Herrera
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Infrastructures is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.