Abstract
This paper describes a case study performed with the US passenger rail service provider Amtrak that developed a metrics framework to measure resilience to climate risk within their Northeast Corridor operations systems and to track changes in resilience over time. Amtrak representatives reviewed metrics and selected those most relevant and also most feasible to measure and implement at Amtrak. Twenty-one metrics, termed resilience activities, focused on technical and organizational (leadership and readiness) resilience; key outcomes to measure following a disruption were identified as cost, safety, customer satisfaction, organizational development, and on-time performance. Resilience activities were scored to serve as a baseline for assessing resilience in the future. While many researchers have generated frameworks or resilience metrics, few published examples of metrics implementation in infrastructure systems are available. Amtrak appears to be progressive in their use of resilience metrics and participated in this process to improve resilience awareness within their organization and identify areas for improvement. Analysis of baseline scoring of resilience activities indicates that Amtrak assesses itself as being relatively more resilient toward climate change risk from an organizational readiness capacity than from an organizational leadership capacity or a technical capacity. Future research may include the tracking of metrics following a disruption and a periodic reassessment of resilience activity scores.
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Data Availability Statement
Some data generated or used during the study are proprietary or confidential in nature and may only be provided with restrictions. This includes the numeric (1–4) scoring of the resilience activities, which is provided in the paper with a Low, Medium, and High rating format. All other data used during the study appear in the published article.
Acknowledgments
Partial funding for this research was provided by the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence. The authors wish to thank the Amtrak employees and leadership who provided valuable information and insight for this work, especially our key collaborators: Beth Termini, Philip Balderston, and Joanne Maxwell.
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Published In
Journal of Infrastructure Systems
Volume 26 • Issue 1 • March 2020
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©2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Feb 22, 2019
Accepted: Aug 6, 2019
Published online: Jan 2, 2020
Published in print: Mar 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Jun 2, 2020
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