Our city’s critical infrastructure providers aim to maximise the reliability and quality of their services. Their reputation, and indeed the reputation of the Netherlands, is strong in this area; however, maintaining this reputation means continuing to invest and innovate. More work is needed to understand possible ‘cascading effects’, which refers to when a disruption of one critical service leads to failures of other services that depend on it. As our city becomes more densely populated and complex, such events pose a larger risk. For example, building more high rises links water supply more closely to electricity supply, as the water needs to pumped to the upper floors.
In the first phase we will deploy the CIrcle Tool developed by Deltares, which is a methodology that systematically identifies dependencies. Linking together stakeholders expertise and open data, the tool provides insight into the dependencies of a selection of The Hague’s critical infrastructure networks. A potential second step is to explore the possibilities to create a visualisation that shows dependencies and models cascading effects in a model.
We will closely work with other cities and regions like Rotterdam and the region of the Waterboard Hollands Noorderkwartier, which have experience with using visualisations and simulation models. We will also connect with the EU DRIVER+ project, which tests tools for understanding cascading effects.
Lead: RTH
Partners: City of The Hague: DSB, DSO, DPS, Deltares, Safety Region Haaglanden, Dunea, Stedin, HHD, HTM, City of Rotterdam, Province of South Holland. EU DRIVER+, 4TU Resilience Center. We welcome other partners that want to contribute to this initiative.
