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This report discusses contextual factors that need to be considered when conducting an indicator-based resilience assessment of smart critical infrastructures (SCIs). It includes legal issues, organizational requirements, as well as ethical considerations.

The report discusses the challenges posed by four types of threats -terrorist attacks, cyber attacks, extreme weather and social unrest- on the SmartResilience case studies. The way this analysis was conducted was by assessing these threats using a 5x5 framework matrix. The two axes of the matrix were phases (understand risks, anticipate/prepare, absorb/withstand, respond/recover, adapt/learn) and dimensions (system/physical, information/data, organizational/business, societal/political, cognitive/decision-making). Each individual matrix block was discussed by subject experts who identified specific challenges and implications for each matrix element and rated its relevance (high, medium, low). In terms of the results, the system/physical dimension received the highest number of important challenges. Overall, the most important singular element was to understand risks in the organizational/business dimension. The least importance was attributed to the adapt/learn phase.

This report is targeting a framing of what SmartResilience actually wants to measure - "resilience"-, taking relevant research results and existing guidelines and standards into account.This is especially challenging due to the vast variety of understandings, definitions, concepts and applications of the term, including usages in different research areas or fields of application. In addition, for the reason of this variety, a huge number of articles and reports discussing the term, its understangings and usages on a theoretical basis have been developed. Even several coprehensive reviews on the term, including qualitative and quantitative literature analysis as well as expert reviews, have already been conducted.

Critical infrastructure systems do not operate isolated from each other. They are highly interconnected. For instance, telecommunication systems require a supply of energy to operate. These interconnections can go in one direction or be mutual. For example, energy systems, in turn, require a functioning telecommunication infrastructure to be operated efficiently. It follows that a large number of infrastructure properties, including resilience, their efficiency, operational state, etc., are not only a function of the state of the given infrastructure itself, but also of all other critical infrastructure systems where interdependencies exist. A direct consequence of this is that a shock or adverse event that impacts one critical infrastructure can result in cascading failures and ripple effects at various scales in, both, space and time, that may ultimately impact larger systems. Due to these considerations, the SmartResilience project aimed from the beginning to analyse such interdependencies between the infrastructures that are considered in eight different case studies.

Critical infrastructure systems do not operate isolated from each other. They are highly interconnected. For instance, telecommunication systems require a supply of energy to operate. These interconnections can go in one direction or be mutual. For example, energy systems, in turn, require a functioning telecommunication infrastructure to be operated efficiently. It follows that a large number of infrastructure properties, including resilience, their efficiency, operational state, etc., are not only a function of the state of the given infrastructure itself, but also of all other critical infrastructure systems where interdependencies exist. A direct consequence of this is that a shock or adverse event that impacts one critical infrastructure can result in cascading failures and ripple effects at various scales in, both, space and time, that may ultimately impact larger systems. Due to these considerations, the SmartResilience project aimed from the beginning to analyse such interdependencies between the infrastructures that are considered in eight different case studies.