Multicriteria decision support for business continuity planning in the event of critical infrastructure disruptions

Abstract

Industrial production sites and Critical Infrastructures (CIs) may be severely damaged by external events, such as man-made or natural hazards. Particularly, a disruption in the electricity supply may cause physical damages and production downtimes associated with substantial economic losses. Due to the tight interdependencies within the different CI sectors and the complex network structure of modern supply chains, these losses are (in most cases) not restricted to single companies and the resultant negative consequences might be propagated via cascading effects into far-off supply chain links. In order to reduce the negative consequences, speed up business recovery and enhance the overall coping capacity of industrial production sites and global supply chains in the event of CI disruptions, many companies have implemented Business Continuity Planning (BCP) programmes. Within this study, we assess the negative impacts of CI disruptions on production industry and introduce a quantitative method for BCP from the field of Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to evaluate the potential BCP measures.