Infrastructures must become more crisis-resistant

How can our society function reliably even in crises? This is the guiding question of the "emergenCITY" center coordinated by TU Darmstadt, in which the universities of Kassel and Marburg are also involved and which is funded as part of the Hessian LOEWE excellence program. Now, a team of scientists from the center is urging stakeholders from politics, business and society to make digital infrastructures crisis-proof in practice. Currently, the risk of failure is higher than commonly thought, the team of authors states in a policy paper.

Digitization is not a trend, but a social and technological fact. It encompasses almost all areas: Communication, health, nutrition, culture, mobility, and energy and water supply. As a consequence, society is becoming increasingly dependent on digital infrastructures - and their potential vulnerability to natural disasters, cyberattacks or technical and human errors can cause great damage. Around the world, natural disasters such as the 2017 hurricane season in the U.S. or the complete power outage in Indonesia in 2019, which affected more than 100 million people, show how quickly networks collapse and rescue calls for help are no longer possible. Another example is a cyber attack from 2017: The malware "Wanna Cry" had infected the servers of Deutsche Bahn - and also paralyzed computers in hospitals, companies and private households.

Being able to react to the unpredictable

COVID-19 is a current crisis example of how stable infrastructures have to be when, from one day to the next, much more work is done from home and digital communication takes place. Data traffic has shifted abruptly. Networks must be flexible enough to cope with such events so that highly relevant areas such as the healthcare system or public services are not negatively affected. After all, if communication networks fail, there is a high probability of cascading effects: Mobility or food supply also stumble or come to a standstill: self-reinforcing effects occur. This is all the more fatal because the human need to communicate during a crisis increases many times over, and the smartphone that is otherwise so quickly drawn becomes useless for calling for help.

Information and communications technology infrastructures are without question the nervous system of modern societies. What if the systems automatically knew how to deal with such crises and failures? The LOEWE center "emergenCITY," which is located at the Technical University of Darmstadt, the University of Kassel, and the University of Marburg, is conducting research on resilient information and communication technologies (ICT). Resilient ICT should be able to cope with overloads, technical faults, cyberattacks, prolonged power outages or material damage. Resilience in this context refers to the ability of a system to absorb crises and recover from them in a timely and sustainable manner. The scientists of "emergenCITY" now urgently recommend increasing the crisis resilience of our infrastructures and thus of society in the long term.

Resilience means designing for crisis

The call is concrete and practical: energy and communications networks must support true emergency operations and a seamless transition back to normal operations in a crisis. This requires a radical rethinking of design. ICT systems often follow similar design principles with similar basic components such as processors or Internet technologies. The use of different components to ensure that a design fault only affects one and not all components provides additional stability. Systems should be designed to hold additional technical resources in reserve. Furthermore, a system must be able to handle peak loads, i.e., it must be prepared for a crisis and not designed exclusively for normal operation. Translated into communications networks, this means that fixed networks, mobile networks and satellite networks must be organizationally separate, operated with heterogeneous components from one another and designed for more load than in normal operation. Only in this way will it be possible to communicate reliably even in a crisis.

Open source offers flexibility

To be fit for the future, ICT systems must be functionally versatile in order to adapt to a crisis. The aim is for systems to be able to take on tasks in a crisis for which they were not originally designed - the University of Marburg in particular is working on this. Example: street lamps with enough battery capacity and retrofitted communications capability can serve as alternative cell towers. The research teams continue to emphasize the importance of digital solutions whose software and hardware are open source in design. The systems of the market leaders are often closed and not further designable, which is why customizable open source systems should be the means of choice. Software-based open source systems offer the advantage of being able to adapt their functionality quickly and cost-effectively.

Acting and regulating together - at all levels

Since "emergenCITY" works on an interdisciplinary basis, political science and - on the part of the University of Kassel - law are also involved in the recommendations with the necessary expertise: The transformation toward greater resilience will be a task for the European, federal, state and local levels and, in terms of implementation, can only be solved in cooperation with citizens. The social component is not neglected: distribution issues are considered from the outset. Social inequality must not play a role in the provision of resources in crises, because resilient systems should serve everyone and not just a few.

The interdependencies and interconnections of private, economic and political actors are the focus of research and can help to enable overarching coordination For the mechanisms of the market alone are not suitable for ensuring resilience and efficiency on an equal footing. The reason is that providers of an efficient but not resilient system can typically realize competitive advantages through cost savings. However, through wise regulation, resilience requirements can be imposed, subject to which efficient economies can still operate according to market rules.

The current crisis surrounding COVID-19 shows that functioning ICT for the use of home offices, medical data exchange and digital cultural offerings can significantly increase the resilience of a society. Germany is not among the international leaders in the digitization of infrastructures and public administration. In order to remain internationally competitive as a leading industrial nation, major efforts must be made in the coming years to renew these infrastructures. Infrastructures must be thought of as digital and resilient at their core and put into practice.

Further information

The policy paper, written by Matthias Hollick, Jens Ivo Engels, Cornelia Fraune, Bernd Freisleben, Gerrit Hornung, Michèle Knodt and Max Mühlhäuser (members of the LOEWE Center "emergenCITY") is available under a Creative Commons license. To download: www.emergencity.de/s/pp1 

About emergenCITY

Scientific coordination of the LOEWE center is the responsibility of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Matthias Hollick, Secure Mobile Networks (SEEMOO), TU Darmstadt. "emergenCITY" is organized as an interdisciplinary (23 professors from computer science, electrical engineering and information technology, mechanical engineering, social and historical sciences, architecture, economics, and law) and cross-location cooperation involving the university partners Technische Universität Darmstadt, Universität Kassel, and Philipps-Universität Marburg. In addition, the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK) and the City of Darmstadt are involved in the center. To address these challenges holistically, "emergenCITY" consists of four interlinked program areas: Societal Aspects and Urban Planning, Information, Communication, and Cyber-Physical Systems.

On the part of the University of Kassel, the departments of Distributed Systems (Prof. Dr. Kurt Geihs) and Public Law, IT Law and Environmental Law (Prof. Dr. Gerrit Hornung) are participating. While Prof. Geihs' team contributes its specific informatics knowledge, Prof. Hornung's group contributes the legal perspective, for example when it comes to data protection or IT security.

Press Contact University of Kassel

Markus Zens
Press spokesman

tel. 0561 804-1961
mail. markus.zen@uni-kassel.de