Towards Antifragile Critical
Infrastructure Systems
Hind Bangui, Barbora Buhnova, and Bruno Rossi
Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Outline
• What is Resilience?
• Why we need to move from Resilience to Antifragility?
• What is Antifragility?
• What are the future directions related to moving from Resilience to Antifragility?
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What is Resilience?
• Critical Infrastructure (CI) may be understood as a large
number of assets, systems, networks, and facilities that
contribute to the lives of people and the economy of a
country as a whole.
• The state of one critical system can directly or indirectly
influence others.
• It is almost impossible to protect an infrastructure
without establishing a prioritization of essential services
and identifying its vulnerabilities.
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What is Resilience?
• Main Representative keywords of Resilience:
• Robustness: It refers to how a system is able to manage increasing complexity, stressors, and challenges.
• Rebound (Recovery): It refers to how a system rebounds from disrupting or traumatic events and returns to
previous or normal activities.
• Adaptability: It refers to the ability of a system to manage/regulate adaptive capacities to continuously
function well, when it will face predictable changes and challenges across its life cycle.
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Resilience Engineering: It aims to create a system able to stretch its
boundaries to find its adaptability and robustness after perturbations.
What is Resilience?
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Why we need to move from Resilience to Antifragility?
• The Covid-19 virus has rapidly spread across the world, and most countries have struggled to
contain it.
• Covid-19 is causing significant disruptions to countless different industries.
• The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic continues to ricochet across globe despite the efforts made
by governments, the public sector and individual businesses to halt its detrimental effect on health
and on the economy.
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Response / Impact Response Underlying technology/operation
Education Widespread closure of educational
institutions;
access to labs is restricted;
projects have been mothballed;
fieldwork interrupted
Virtual learning environment (online teaching,
presentation, assessment, and consultation);
convocation online
Online video conferencing
software,
virtual labs on cloud
Healthcare Overcrowded hospitals,
inability to meet the demands on
them
Contact tracing,
forecasting resource requirements,
allotment of scare resources based on a patient’s
survivability,
COVID-19 vaccine development,
telehealth (online consultation with a doctor or
medical professional);
AI, cloud computing,
chatbot
Industry Closure of some industries Work from home,
remote operations,
automation and autonomous operation
Robots, automation,
3-D printing
Retail Stores closed,
only online service,
avoidance of retail shopping
Online shopping,
home delivery
The Web, online payment,
contactless payment
Personal life and
social interaction
Lockdown Indoor activities Phone, audio and video chats,
streaming, online gaming
Global transformation caused by the coronavirus
Why we need to move from Resilience to Antifragility?
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Why we need to move from Resilience to Antifragility?
Transforming these experienced challenges
during the pandemic to opportunities
• Providing models to accommodate the
contemporary changes in online learning,
• Reviewing the process of digital transformation of
institutions,
• Modelling Student Behaviour in Synchronous
Online Learning,
• Designing more scalable and personalized online
learning models,
• Redesign the learning process.
Challenges during the pandemic
• Educational activities were switched to remote
learning platforms and this migration came with
several logistical challenges.
• Pandemic-related anxiety had negative effects on
student academic performance,
• Academic performance of students might be affect
by economic and resource differences,
• The larger parts of instructors were not effectively
ready to deliver high-quality instruction remotely.
• Resilience in the face of uncertainty.
• No previous training, no prior strategic
planning knowledge, no prior operational
experience, and no former decision‐making
skillset has prepared anyone for this
pandemic.
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Response / Impact Response Underlying technology/operation
Education Widespread closure of educational
institutions;
access to labs is restricted;
projects have been mothballed;
fieldwork interrupted
Virtual learning environment (online teaching,
presentation, assessment, and consultation);
convocation online
Online video conferencing
software,
virtual labs on cloud
Healthcare Overcrowded hospitals,
inability to meet the demands on
them
Contact tracing,
forecasting resource requirements,
allotment of scare resources based on a patient’s
survivability,
COVID-19 vaccine development,
telehealth (online consultation with a doctor or
medical professional);
AI, cloud computing,
chatbot
Industry Closure of some industries Work from home,
remote operations,
automation and autonomous operation
Robots, automation,
3-D printing
Retail Stores closed,
only online service,
avoidance of retail shopping
Online shopping,
home delivery
The Web, online payment,
contactless payment
Personal life and
social interaction
Lockdown Indoor activities Phone, audio and video chats,
streaming, online gaming
Global transformation caused by the coronavirus
Why we need to move from Resilience to Antifragility?
Why we need to move from Resilience to Antifragility?
Confined Symphony
Personal life and social interaction
• Definition of Critical Infrastructures (CI): “Organizational and physical structures and facilities of
such vital importance to a nation's society and economy that their failure or degradation would
result in sustained supply shortages, significant disruption of public safety and security, or other
dramatic consequences“.
• CHANGING NATURE OF CRITICALITY
• Some industries have been able to shift production from non-essential to essential products.
• A Healthcare Example: Parks are typically considered a non-essential service. However,
during COVID-19, parks have proven their value by serving as field hospitals, providing
alternative shelters for socially vulnerable groups, and promoting physical, emotional, and
mental well-being.
Why we need to move Resilience to Antifragility?
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• Definition of Critical Infrastructures (CI): “Organizational and physical structures and facilities of
such vital importance to a nation's society and economy that their failure or degradation would
result in sustained supply shortages, significant disruption of public safety and security, or other
dramatic consequences“.
• CHANGING NATURE OF CRITICALITY
• Defining which systems are CI results in a prioritization of resources during extreme events.
• Critical infrastructure definitions should account for the changing services and functions of
industries during hazards.
• Treating criticality as dynamic appears crucial to identifying how to meet basic needs through
infrastructure changes as hazards vary.
Why we need to move Resilience to Antifragility?
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Why we need to move from Resilience to Antifragility?
• Critical Systems are those which not only survive shocks but also actively “employ” them to
become stronger.
• Critical Systems adapt to volatility and learn from experiences, faults, and incidents, for instance,
through a “learning by doing” process how to thrive as conditions evolve (i.e., adaptability and
evolvability).
• Going beyond the traditional target of resilience.
• Bringing a new perspective of sustainability to complex adaptive systems.
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Why we need to move from Resilience to Antifragility?
Resilience Engineering: It aims to create a system able to stretch its boundaries to find its adaptability
and robustness after perturbations.
• Learning and Adapting fragile systems to the real unexpected circumstances.
• Accelerating the digital transformation.
• Resilience focuses only on ex post
adaptation, which often comes too late.
• The resilient entity resists shocks and stays
the same.
Antifragility Engineering: It aims to enable a
system not merely to tolerate adverse
conditions and stretch its boundaries but
rather to strengthen and learn in the
process.
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What is Antifragility?
• The concept of antifragility was proposed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
in his book “Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder”,
published in 2012.
• Fragile object definition: “If these perturbations can only harm,
damage or break the object, then the object is fragile. Give it enough
time, and a perturbation of a sufficient magnitude will eventually
take palce to damage or break it. A fragile object is an object likely
to get damaged or to break with time.”
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What is Antifragility?
• “Things that gain from disorder” => Appreciate, some level of stressors, failures and mistakes to
obtain better performance over a longer time horizon.
• The human immune system is an example of an antifragile system, as it becomes stronger from
regular exposure to germs.
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What is Antifragility?
• Antifragility actively seeks to inject volatility in systems to expose fragility.
• Unlike robust systems, antifragile systems learn from failures how to adjust themselves to limit the
impact of future failures and become stronger in a continually changing environment.
• An antifragile system is able to evolve its identity and improve itself systematically in its operating
context.
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Future Directions
• COVID-19 reveals several important limitations to how we approach and manage our critical
infrastructures in a complex and uncertain world.
• COVID-19 is a window of opportunity for laying new foundations for how we design, operate, and
manage infrastructure
• Antifragility is an emphasis on learning and creativity:
• An antifragile system is able to shift from leadership in stable to unstable conditions.
• Antifragility actively seeks to inject volatility in systems to expose fragility.
• A self-improving system should be capable of collecting its own training data and learning from it.
• Applications of artificial intelligence have the potential to support creativity in antifragile systems.
Acceleration of the digital transformation process in Critical Infrastructures.
Adoption of digital technologies that are the main driving forces of digitalization, such as Internet of Things
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Challenge : How to build an antifragile system ?
Needs
Future Directions
• The adoption of IoT is still in its infancy and many business sectors are still reluctant to adopt
IoT due to the lack of consumer acceptance.
• The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation of many organisations.
• Increase in IoT Threats and risks : 57% of IoT devices vulnerable to severe attacks (Source:
Palo Alto Networks )
• Security and Privacy are the major barriers to wider IoT adoption: 85% of the survey of 170 IoT
industry leaders believe that security and privacy concerns remain a major barrier to IoT adoption
(Source: OMDIA)
Result: Increased lack of trust in IoT services and products
Slowed incorporation of IoT innovations
Slowed adoption of Antifragile systems
Challenge 1: Addressing trust management issues in digital world ➔ Challenge 2: Building Antifragile Systems
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Thank you for your attention