This project focuses on cyber threats to the electrical grid, where digitalization is becoming pervasive, to gain in efficiency and control. The project proposes the development of an Integrated Framework for Smart City Economic Resilience Assessment (IF-SCERA), a Geographic Information System (GIS)-based, city-level resilience analysis framework for critical infrastructures integrated with multi-criteria impact analysis, with focus on economic resilience.

IF-SCERA advances the state-of-the-art of integrated critical infrastructure / economic impact analysis, where the economic impact of disruptions is typically based on aggregated macroeconomic indicators, lumping interactions across infrastructures and between infrastructures and economy. IF-SCERA builds the analysis framework on scenario-specific narratives, for improved understanding of economic resilience, and developed involving expertise covering infrastructure, economic, social science, and crisis management aspects.The narratives aim at assessing the criticality of the impacted activities and services to the economic resilience, through the proposed multi-criteria Economic Resilience Criticality (ERC) index, which would point to where the city economy and business are most/least resilient.

Furthermore, aggregated macroeconomic indicators are typically related to economic values during business-as-usual situations, and, therefore, provide understanding of the largest economic impacts. Indeed, these are not necessarily aligned to needs during emergency situations, when economy (and more broadly societal wellbeing) needs to be reestablished. The proposed multidimensional ERC index aims at filling this gap, combining indicators both related to typical economic aspects (e.g., losses and costs) as well as related to the broader role of activities and services for economic resilience (e.g., societal wellbeing, etc.).

The project will have specific application focus on the City of Winterthur in Switzerland, already engaged within the proposed project. Indeed, the developed framework will be intended for general applicability, transferable to different cities and expandable to consider other infrastructures and impact indicators.