Emergent vulnerabilities in Integrated Operations: A proactive simulation study of economic risk

The protection of critical infrastructure requires an understanding of the effects of change on current and future safety and operations. Vulnerabilities may emerge during the rollout of updated techniques and integration of new technology with existing work practices. Managers need to understand how their decisions, often focused on economic priorities, affect the dynamics of vulnerability over time. Such understanding is difficult to obtain, as the historical data typically used for decision support, prediction and forecasting may not be available.We report on the use of group model building and simulation to consider proactively the effects of a 10-year, multi-billion dollar modernization of offshore oil operations. A system dynamics model defines the problem in terms of the structure of work process and knowledge transitions. The model is parameterized with data from workshops conducted with groups of experts in oil production. The simulation suggests that vulnerability increases from the alterations to work process and knowledge associated with change, and only resolves as these alterations are absorbed into normal activities and experience. The forces that generate vulnerability compound in unanticipated ways, leading to possible exponential growth in the cost of incidents. The numerical results, while based on theory and assumptions made in the absence of historical data, indicate that accelerating the IO transition may increase incident costs sufficiently to put the program at risk.The contribution of this paper is three-fold: We describe how group model building and simulation techniques establish a problem domain and focus in the critical infrastructure arena where traditional data-driven methods are not available. The model quantifies the effects of operational and behavioral variables surrounding the effects of technology change, including areas that are difficult to measure directly, such as knowledge and vulnerability. Finally, the ability to consider a wide range of effects and outcomes in the absence of historical data provides a starting point for managerial ideation about the need for vulnerability mitigation.