Managing Pandemic Resilience with Other Cascading Disruptions of a Socio-Technical System

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred the development of methodologies to assess risk to economic development plans. To increase local recovery efforts, the federal government provides funding for regional economic development. Funds are allocated based on immediate needs as well as growth potential. This work advances the risk register methodology to prioritize infrastructure initiatives – potential projects, policies, or other actions an organization may take – while considering the influence of exogenous scenarios on priorities given the impact of COVID-19. The risk register identifies performance criteria which measure performance – for example, an initiative incentivizing restaurants to increase outdoor seating improves a create new jobs criterion. Next, the register identifies disruptive events and groups these events into scenarios. There are now two sets of data: the initiatives considered for implementations, and a set of disruptive scenarios, including a baseline. The register evaluates the impact of each scenario on each initiative. For each scenario, the initiative with greatest impact on performance criteria is ranked first, and so on for the remaining scenarios. These rankings mathematically capture the influence of each scenario on the priority of each initiative. The risk register mathematically quantifies the disruptiveness of each scenario, allowing the comparison of different disruptive events. This information can help determine how to allocate resources to improve system resilience. The risk register methodology is applied to a socio-technical system of systems. This work advances methods outlined in the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge, specifically the System of Systems knowledge area.