Calculating Impacts with RWI LABS
In the past year, events like the global pandemic and the Texas grid failure remind us why we should be looking to the future to figure out resilience.
Cities are under pressure to future-proof their critical infrastructure against all kinds of new threats from climate to cyber while balancing the costs of sustainable investments. RUNWITHIT’s Single Synthetic Modelling Platform furnishes a great starting place to bring together everything required to examine the profound human impacts, the existing and potential role of utility technologies, and the unprecedented scenarios imagined by the world. While looking to solve these complex challenges, RWI LABS is also about setting out to explore and extend our base models' capability and, along the way, innovate insight, perspective and possibility – our very own Future Lab.
For our first investigation, we created Synthetic Vancouver, a Single Synthetic Environment (SSE) of Vancouver, complete with 224,283 diverse Synthetic People living and working in a 15.4 square kilometre area. Synthetic Populations are a part of our base platform. We then triggered a Black Sky Event with an unknown length and widespread scope, in this case, a power outage caused by a cyber attack.
Black Sky Events
Black Sky events are catastrophic events that severely disrupt our critical infrastructure's normal functioning in multiple regions for long periods of time. They can be caused by natural disasters or man-made events, like a cyberattack that cascades across the grid.
Our grids are under attack every day by sophisticated state-sponsored actors and criminal hackers seeking new ways to target critical infrastructure. The threats surrounding these cyber attacks are real, and the stakes are high. Our grids were never meant to be defensible.
Energy infrastructure doesn't end at the grid. Energy grids also power connected systems such as heat, water and waste, connected services such as communications and, increasingly, transportation, critical emergency response and care.
With that said, you may be wondering why we decided to focus on a cyber outage, considering the recent events in Texas. The answer is because it can be so much worse. In terms of electricity and the grid, cyber attacks have the ability to be a never-ending storm with deadly consequences. Solutions are a global imperative.
Resilence and RWI LABS
The concept of resilience is not new; working resilience into our everyday infrastructure, however, is challenging. With our base SSE platform, RWI LABS 1.0 explores what happens, the unknowns, where relief is needed, where resilience is most impactful and where most vulnerable people are located. The key to being resilient is not only knowing your city but also your city’s population.
We will be sharing our findings along the way, studying the intersections of people, infrastructure and policy during a month-long outage caused by a cyber attack and calculated the impact.
RUNWITHIT is actively working to contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s). This project has contributed to the following SDG’s:
