MTS Guide outlines processes, tools for conceiving, designing, implementing resilience assessment
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) partnered with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Engineer Research and Development Center (USACE-ERDC) to develop the Marine Transportation System Resilience Assessment Guide (MTS Guide). The document will be used by federal agencies, local governments, and industry decision-makers that manage risk and enhance resilience to critical infrastructure systems and functions through conducting resilience assessments. The MTS Guide also organizes multiple methodologies and port resilience assessment tools to support resilience planning.
The MTS assessment document provides a consistent, repeatable process for conducting uniform assessments of the resilience of the complicated systems that comprise the Marine Transportation System (MTS). It offers advice for assembling the diverse group of public and private stakeholders and agencies that manage these systems; provides a framework for conducting resilience assessments; and provides a variety of resources to support resilience assessments.
Use of the MTS Guide will result in closer relationships between stakeholders and partners who may not traditionally be involved in a port resilience assessment, and produce a holistic understanding of system vulnerabilities and functions. It will also work on expanding awareness of the dependencies and interdependencies within a specific port system and identifying practices or investments that can enhance resilience and inform risk mitigation decision-making.
“The Maritime Transportation System Resilience Assessment Guide is integral to the development of a unified approach to address resilience indicators for port infrastructure systems, and functions that assess the key dimensions of critical infrastructure in the maritime domain,” David Mussington, CISA’s executive assistant director for infrastructure security, said in a media statement on Wednesday.
The MTS Guide methodology is based on the CISA Regional Resilience Assessment Methodology (RRAP Methodology) and Infrastructure Resilience Planning Framework (IRPF) principles tailored to operators in the MTS domain. It added that CISA had developed three recent documents that assist in this collective defense of the nation’s critical infrastructure – RRAP Methodology, IRPF, and Marine Transportation System Resilience Assessment Guide that provide critical infrastructure security practitioners with a common framework and process for addressing complex infrastructure resilience issues.
The purpose of the MTS Guide is three-fold – to provide guide users with a shared understanding of how to design and conduct a resilience assessment of MTS components; to close the gap between available resources and needs by organizing and identifying planning tools, academic studies, datasets, and methodologies used to assess MTS resilience; and illustrate the assessment process through examples and case studies across three scopes that have been developed to represent various existing systems and potential applications.
The MTS Guide outlines a process for organizing and understanding the complicated systems that comprise the MTS while providing advice for assembling a diverse group of public and private stakeholders and agencies that manage these systems. It also introduces a framework for structuring a resilience assessment and assembles a variety of resources that make an assessment possible based on the goals of the guide user.
The benefits of completing a resilience assessment include a closer relationship with stakeholders and partners who may not traditionally be involved in planning exercises, a holistic understanding of the system’s most important vulnerabilities and functions, buy-in from agency or seaport leadership, an awareness of the dependencies and interdependencies within a system, and the identification of practices or investments that can reduce the risk of disruption and save time, effort, and funding in the future.
The MTS Guide is intended to supplement and improve existing processes—not to replace them—by helping guide users to conduct resilience assessments and incorporate resilience enhancements into planning and investment activities. The MTS is most easily recognized by its ports and navigation infrastructure – facilities that connect and support the movement of commodities.
An assessment fits into a larger planning process that must consider trends, disruptive scenarios, often divergent stakeholder interests, and concepts of a resilient future. Incorporating resilience into these existing planning processes includes defining how an assessment will help stakeholders agree on the challenges and evaluate alternative actions to prepare, absorb, recover, and adapt to future hazards. Effective consideration of resilience in strategic planning will result in cost-effective investments that limit unplanned disruptions to operations, creating a competitive advantage in a close market.
The MTS Guide can augment regional and port planning by guiding the user to sources of information and analysis through several phases of analysis that can help stakeholders develop a shared understanding of resilience, identify resilience gaps, and reach an agreement on a path forward to address those gaps. Assessment results will link to critical functions (e.g. maintaining channel dimensions, drayage, intermodal exchanges, warehousing) and the infrastructure that supports them and provide information tailored for future decision-making needs.
These linkages happen through four key Resilience Assessment Objectives that are the foundation for every resilience assessment. These include defining functions and characterizing the system in a steady state, analyzing critical infrastructure and dependencies, understanding the impacts of disruptive events, and identifying and evaluating resilience enhancement alternatives.
The MTS Guide provides an approach to conducting a resilience assessment that is customizable and scalable according to user objectives, desired level of information for decision-making, the scope of interest, and available resources. The resilience assessment process is similar to other planning and project management frameworks where the user moves through a series of phases to help them identify the issues and stakeholders, focus the assessment and activities, execute the assessment, and implement findings.
The overarching goal of a resilience assessment is to understand how well a system will perform its intended function(s) over time, including under scenarios that can disrupt normal functioning.
The MTS Guide describes an assessment process that is fulfilled through four key objectives that support analysis of the MTS and its diversity of system types and contexts. These objectives form the foundation of any resilience assessment and can provide a framework to assess project goals, determine the emphasis of an assessment, and design an assessment plan and analytic strategy that is tailored accordingly.
During issue identification and early engagements with core stakeholders and collaborating partners, these objectives may reveal areas of particular interest that need to be addressed.
Assessments can take many forms, from broad studies that take a regional perspective and consider a range of threats and hazards to narrowly tailored efforts focused on a single risk scenario for an individual terminal, the MTS Guide said. “Regardless of scope, there is a series of activities and practices that can help ensure an assessment accomplishes its goal. While the previous section discussed the four objectives that comprise a resilience assessment, this section outlines a generalized process for planning, designing, executing an assessment, and implementing its results,” it added.
Beginning with pre-assessment, the guide also provides an approach for conducting resilience assessments and provides practical tips and considerations that can lay the foundation for a sound assessment and ensure it stays on track throughout execution.
In conclusion, the MTS Guide offers a generalized process and tools for conceiving, designing, and implementing a resilience assessment. The process leverages four key resilience objectives to ensure that every assessment results in a broader understanding of the MTS, its development drivers, interactions with stakeholders, and the critical functions and infrastructure interdependencies. The process also provides an organized set of tools and resources to complete an assessment according to guide user objectives, scope, and available resources.
The objective of the MTS Guide is to draw on existing resources to provide a consistent replicable framework for conducting a resilience assessment that results in actionable resilience recommendations for federal agencies, state and local governments, academia, and private industry.
A complimentary guide to the who`s who in industrial cybersecurity tech & solutions
Free DownloadRelated
