Assessing Risk and Resiliency

Professor Adrian Gheorghe Keeps A Close Eye On Critical Infrastructures

By Jim Raper

As a new resident of Hampton Roads and an inveterate world traveler, Adrian Gheorghe can appreciate the beauty and vitality of the region’s popular seacoast and bustling port. As the new Batten Chair of Systems Engineering at Old Dominion University, he can see risks and vulnerabilities in those same attributes.

During the last two decades, Gheorghe, a Romanian by birth, became one of Europe’s leading risk assessment engineers. Early in his career, he began researching safety and reliability issues pertaining to nuclear power generation and the ­distribution of electricity. Now, he also is applying his analysis to a wide array of contemporary threats, those associated with terrorism, natural disasters, pandemics, cyber vandalism, and transportation or communication breakdowns.

Gheorghe’s research is summed up by the titles of the international journal he edits—Critical Infrastructures—and of the book he published earlier this year—“Critical Infrastructures at Risk” (Springer).

What is a critical infrastructure? The endowed professor says the definition may depend on who you are and where you live. Generally, a “CI,” as he calls it, is a system or service that people depend upon for normal existence. People often come to think of CIs as “rights,” Gheorghe says. “To some it may be as simple as hot water and cold beer. These could be the same people who believe tomatoes grow at Wal-Mart.”

In fact, he says, each CI is a weave of complex and interdependent components. This “system of systems” concept has given the name to Gheorghe’s branch of engineering (SoSE).

“It is like surfing big waves,” he says as an aside. “I’ve surfed from systems engineering to system of systems engineering. This is the second wave for me, and I doubt that I’m going to live long enough to catch another big one.”

Disasters Can Bring Political Unrest
Some CIs, though complex, deliver very basic needs, such as food and drinking water. Other CIs were not even on Gheorghe’s radar when he was a student, such as the Internet. Remaining examples involve roads, bridges and tunnels; dams and levees; police and military protection; health and medical care; electricity service; fuel services; public transportation; banking systems; communications systems; and even a culture’s key artifacts, sporting events, artworks and buildings.

When a CI breaks down, normal existence is interrupted, and the people touched by the calamity will be demoralized or inconvenienced, and perhaps suffer or die. The fallout often is political unrest.

Gheorghe points out that many CI breakdowns are highly localized, and that risk assessments are often region-specific. For example, disaster planning for southeastern Virginia must deal with the peculiar realities of East Coast hurricanes, blockages or bottlenecks at bridges and tunnels, and dangers posed by ships in the harbor.

In his first public Hampton Roads lecture in fall 2006, Gheorghe outlined his research on European tunnel disasters, such as the fire in 1999 that closed the alpine Mont Blanc vehicular tunnel between France and Italy for more than a year. The fire, caused by a tractor-trailer that was hauling margarine and flour, turned the tunnel into a blast furnace that killed 39 people. It burned for two days and did $300 million in damage. Gheorghe said safety planning for the tunnel never anticipated an inferno keyed by flour and margarine, nor a tunnel ventilation system that would cause more harm than good, nor legal challenges that would keep the tunnel closed for months after it was repaired.

The accident demonstrates the complexity of disaster-mitigation planning for the five tunnel complexes in Hampton Roads, according to Gheorghe.

Potential Disasters Modeled for Hampton Roads
At Gheorghe’s fall lecture, about 125 engineers, emergency response professionals and military personnel also saw computer simulations of dangerous-fumes emergencies that Hampton Roads might experience. These models were based on simulation tools developed by him and European colleagues.

“I think I have brought to the table here some tools that will save years of academic research at Old Dominion,” he says. This could bolster and speed up the disaster preparedness assistance that academics can provide to governments. When applied to aerial photos of Hampton Roads, the models show street-by-street how various wind conditions would affect dispersion of fumes caused by spills or fires at specific hazardous materials sites. “The mayors, I believe, would like to have these on their desks during emergencies,” Gheorghe told the audience.

Highly localized risk assessment, however, is only a small part of Gheorghe’s expertise. He is best known as a risk engineer without borders. No sooner had he moved into his new office in Kaufman Hall on the ODU campus this past summer than he was off to Europe to deliver lectures and speeches at international disaster prevention and mitigation meetings in Zurich, Davos, Istanbul and Vienna. One of his goals, he says, is to publicize the extent to which most people on the planet are in the same boat as far as risks are concerned.

“CIs must be protected beyond homeland borders,” Gheorghe is fond of saying. The failure of a localized system tends to cascade into a series of failures, he notes, and the result sometimes is a domino-effect catastrophe involving interdependent CIs around the globe.

In a full conversation with Gheorghe, it becomes clear that he also resists being hemmed in by professional borders. The scope of his interests is broad enough to make him sound at times like a political scientist or a psychologist, a sociologist or an economist. (His four advanced degrees include an M.B.A. from the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest as well as a Ph.D. in systems science and systems engineering from City University in London.)

“Dr. Gheorghe’s work has applications that extend far beyond the field of engineering to embrace the organization of knowledge and ideas, including philosophy and political science,” said ODU President Roseann Runte. “Old Dominion University is extremely fortunate to have attracted him. His wealth of experience and exciting research portfolio place our university at the forefront of international systems research.”

Experts Study Previous Breakdowns of Systems
Gheorghe sometimes subtitles his lectures, “An awareness-raising campaign,” and he seems determined to imprint a checklist on the mind of anyone whose actions are essential to a critical infrastructure. Will engineering to prevent catastrophic failure actually harm systems operations under normal or near-normal conditions? Are our systems being asked to do more than they were designed to do? Are adequate early-warning systems in place? Have we learned all we can from previous natural disasters, accidents and mistakes? How do we isolate system breakdowns to prevent collapse of the whole CI, or multiple CIs? How do we cope with damage perceptions of victims and damage portrayals by news media? Have engineering strategies emphasized recovery from disasters, as well as prevention of disasters?

Another question he often asks has to do with governance and leadership decisions: Are the “crisis of the day” and mercurial popular opinion diverting our attention from slowly developing — but potentially disastrous — problems, such as global warming or overcrowding within our largest cities?

As Gheorghe describes it, SoSE risk management must assume differences in peoples’ expectations, customs and politics as part of the overall complexity of the task. Variables might spring from how much inconvenience one will accept or how much privacy one is willing to give up in order to gain security.

His lecture in Norfolk included commentary on how differently Americans and Europeans view the worldwide tide of terrorism: Americans see it as a problem for the military; Europeans see it as a problem for law enforcement. Americans want to reinforce their borders; Europeans favor a borderless society.

“Complexity related to infrastructures can stem from new values, new technologies, political correctness, and the political word from the Kremlin, the White House or from along the Champs-Elysees,” he explains. “Some want a hard society. Some want a soft society. Even whether a country has 110-volt or 220-volt service reflects a mindset that we must consider.”
In Austria this past summer, Gheorghe formally proposed to the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis that its affiliates collaborate on fundamental risk and vulnerability research with ODU’s Batten College of Engineering and Technology and National Centers for System of Systems Engineering. This collaboration would involve the computer modeling of complex systems, and could identify better ways to apply SoSE to risk management.

Indexes Would Allow Investments in Secure Companies
Oktay Baysal, dean of the Batten College, said the university’s system of systems engineering initiative responds to local and national needs in homeland security. “As we build our expertise in this field, we are grateful to Mr. Frank Batten (founder of the Norfolk-based Landmark Communications Inc.) for his endowment that allowed us to bring in an internationally renowned scholar from Switzerland. Among Dr. Gheorghe’s long list of accomplishments is the editorship of the international journal Critical Infrastructures. When authorities worldwide want to publish in this field, they will send their articles to Old Dominion University.”

One of Gheorghe’s current projects involves his leadership roles in the World Security Forum and the European Institute for Risk and Security (EURISC). He and the organizations are floating a proposal to create World Security Indexes (WSI) that would be similar to Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes (DJSI).

Whereas the DJSI track corporate management performance, reputation and physical/political/cultural circumstances relative to sustainability, the WSI would track corporate vulnerability to terrorism and other disasters. Companies whose operations are the most secure could become eligible for a WSI stamp of approval, which would be attractive to investors. “Security is a commodity,” Gheorghe says. “If a company pays a lot for security, why shouldn’t it be rewarded for it?”

Gheorghe’s conference participation during his summer travels in Switzerland, Austria, Romania and Turkey resulted in seven presentations, including a keynote address—“Risk and Vulnerability of Critical Infrastructures: A System of Systems Engineering Solution.” Other topics included pandemics and the Katrina and Chernobyl disasters. Trips coming up late in the year to Germany and Brazil would let him spread his message to new audiences.

His many speaking and workshop invitations reflect his professional experience during the last 25 years with the Bucharest Polytechnic University, the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and the Centre of Excellence on Risk and Safety Sciences of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Current trends in SoSE risk assessment that he is addressing in his presentations involve both low-tech and high-tech safeguards, he says.

For example, there is a push to emphasize “resilience” over “robustness.” This can require experts and the public to come to terms with CI weaknesses, and not to expect systems to be bulletproof. One way to address the weaknesses might be as simple as educating people about fending for themselves when CIs break down.

But, on the high-tech side, Gheorghe also has a lot of faith in the ever-improving computer modeling for disaster mitigation. Computer analysis protects against the quicksand of intuitiveness, he says. Human input must set parameters, but, in the end, it is only the computer that can crunch the massive amount of data that informs SoSE risk assessments.

The computer-generated findings might be surprising and they might be frightening. Cold, hard facts that are free of ego and bias are often like that. Gheorghe suggests that we remember the old saying: “When I analyze myself, I detest myself, but when I compare myself to others, I adore myself.”