Enhancing Infrastructure Resilience in Service Utilities through Embedding Versatility in System Architecture

Enhancing infrastructure resilience, a key component of transforming and sustainably developing service utilities, requires a transdisciplinary and systems engineering framework. Addressing vulnerabilities in system architecture offers opportunities for resilience improvements, thereby mitigating the environmental, social, and economic impacts of prolonged system restoration times and cascading effects throughout the entire system. This paper presents embedded versatility as a crucial component of infrastructure resilience, which is vital for service utilities to optimize their system architecture and excel in sustainable development. By employing the System‐of‐Systems approach as a central element of the assessment methodology, this study emphasizes the cumulative advantages of integrating versatility at various hierarchical levels within the system architecture. This paper proposes that the primary advantage of using versatility as an index for quantifying resilience limits is its temporal dimension, as the index decreases with the aging of infrastructures. The scenario analysis findings of this paper indicate that embedding versatility as an attribute of system architecture leads to aggregating resilience gains for the entire service utility system, thereby improving system restoration times. This study concludes that implementing the proposed framework, followed by pilot exercises, provides service utilities a measure to enhance infrastructure resilience by optimizing system architecture. Ultimately, this framework helps identify and integrate elements of sustainable development in the form of resilience, paving the way for the utility of the future.