General

1. What is the Technical Resilience Navigator Lite?

   The Technical Resilience Navigator (TRN) Lite is a risk-informed resilience planning tool that helps organizations manage the risk to critical missions from disruptions in energy and water services and critical load operations. It provides a systematic approach to identifying energy, water, and critical load resilience gaps and developing solutions that reduce risk. The TRN Lite enables organizations to be proactive in identifying and addressing vulnerabilities to their critical energy and water systems to reduce outage impacts and support continuous mission operations, which could result in cost and waste reduction. The TRN Lite also provides resources and links for more in-depth information on relevant topics.

2. What does it mean to be resilient?

   Resilience refers to the ability to anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to changing conditions and to withstand, respond to, and recover rapidly from disruptions through holistic planning and technical solutions. Highly resilient systems have the ability to prevent disruption or reduce the magnitude or duration of disruptive events caused by hazards. The resilience of a system can be characterized in terms of four key attributes; resourcefulness, redundancy, robustness, and recovery:

   • Resourcefulness, or preparedness, is the ability to prepare for, respond to, and manage a disruption. This includes identifying solutions, business continuity planning, training, supply chain management, prioritizing actions to control and mitigate damage, and effective communication.
   • Redundancy includes back-up resources and islandable onsite generation systems to support primary systems in case of failure, which could include redundant generators serving critical power loads, water storage tanks servicing critical water loads, and reliable redundant and secondary redundant systems that enable the continuity of operations during a disruptive event, such as a utility outage.
   • Robustness is the ability to maintain critical operations and functions during a disruptive event. This includes the building itself, the design of the infrastructure (office buildings, power generation, distribution structures, bridges, dams, levees), or system redundancy and substitution (transportation, power grid, communications networks).
   • Recovery is the ability to return to normal operating conditions as quickly and efficiently as possible after a disruption, which may include carefully drafted contingency plans, competent emergency operations, and having the right people and resources in the right place at the right time.
3. What are the benefits of using the TRN Lite?

   The TRN provides many benefits, such as:

   • A risk-informed approach that actively assesses site risk.
   • A modular approach that allows users to focus on their specific areas of interest.
   • Actionable results centered on solutions that can enhance site resilience.
   • Outputs that can easily be incorporated into resilience plan documentation.
   • A repository of useful resources such as links to best practices, checklists, and other helpful resilience materials.
4. Why is the TRN Lite focused on energy and water resilience?

   The TRN Lite focuses on energy and water systems for two primary reasons:

   • Energy and water are the two keystone systems on which all other systems rely for proper function. Preserving functionality of these key systems is essential for the maintenance of a site’s ongoing mission during an adverse event.
   • The components that constitute energy and water systems are vast and diverse, often requiring substantial partnership and coordination to manage, providing significant complexity for resilience planning.
   • In the unlikely event that some critical loads at a site do not require energy and/or water inputs, users may select None as a supply type and complete just the critical load failure risk assessment (Disruptions – Load Failures subsection) for those critical loads.
5. What is the relationship between risk and resilience?

   Risk is the “relationship between a particular hazard or threat that might degrade the performance of infrastructure and the consequences that might result from a degradation of performance.¹” Risk is determined through analysis of: 1) the probabilities of different types of hazards or threats occurring (H); 2) the probabilities that the site’s vulnerabilities would prevent the site from withstanding those hazards or threats and maintaining critical missions (V); and 3) the consequences should the hazards or threats occur and the site’s protective systems fail (C). At a high level, risk is calculated by multiplying the hazards and threats, vulnerabilities, and consequences:

   Risk (R)=Hazards and Threats (H)*Vulnerability (V)*Consequence(C)

   Resilience is the ability to anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to changing conditions and to withstand, respond to, and recover rapidly from disruptions, whatever the cause of that disruption. Resilience is often characterized using attributes such as resourcefulness, redundancy, robustness, and recovery. Enhancing resilience will reduce unacceptable risk by improving one or more of the resilience attributes. An organization that has prepared for and is able to respond quickly to a disruption to reduce the downtime of a mission is more resilient than an organization that has not prepared for such events. The organization could accomplish this by addressing a vulnerability (e.g. increasing the reliability of redundant energy or water systems), reducing a consequence (e.g. creating a work-from-home plan in the event of an outage), or reducing the probability that the hazard (an outage) would occur (e.g. working with the utility to add a new water supply line to the site). In each case, these resilience-enhancing actions reduce risk. A successful resilience solution will reduce unacceptable risk and increase resilience.

6. What is meant by the TRN Lite’s risk-informed approach?

   A risk-informed approach is one in which quantified risk is among the considerations of decision-makers in managing the design and operations of a system or collection of systems. The TRN Lite takes a risk-informed approach to developing and assessing the effectiveness of resilience solutions. Users will conduct a risk assessment to focus on the hazard, threat, and failure scenarios; vulnerabilities; and water and energy loads that contribute most to the outage risk of critical missions. Users can then view potential risk mitigation and resilience enhancing solutions generated for those energy and water loads that contribute the most risk.

7. How does the TRN deal with sensitive or classified information?

   Classified information should never be entered into the TRN Lite. For sites that want to use the TRN Lite and have information that could be considered sensitive, or combined it could become classified, user should set of a version of the TRN Lite on their own servers, following information provided on the Downloadable Version webpage.

8. How long will it take to complete the TRN Lite?

   The TRN Lite encompasses a broad range of data collection and analysis processes that can be approached with varying degrees of detail. Therefore, the time needed to go through the entire TRN Lite process can vary significantly based on the site size, level of detail incorporated into the process, and amount of staff time allotted to the process. For a quick assessment where data about critical functions and loads is already well understood, users can expect to spend about a half workday completing the TRN Lite.

9. What kind of support will DOE provide to users of the TRN Lite?

   The TRN Lite is designed to be used independently by sites that are engaged in the resilience planning process. The availability of informational resources is intended to provide the needed background material to understand the TRN Lite process. FEMP is available to answer user questions and provide limited technical assistance on its use. Please contact FEMP via the FEMP Technical Assistance Request Portal webpage.

Site Level Planning

10. How does the TRN Lite contribute to existing organizational resilience planning efforts?

    The TRN Lite is intended to complement the existing resilience planning efforts of an organization by providing information and resources that can be included in these activities. For organizations without existing resilience planning processes, the TRN Lite offers a step-by-step approach to help build an understanding of plans, priorities, and baseline conditions related to energy and water systems, and what types of gaps might expose the site to risk. The evaluations contained in the TRN Lite are designed to record foundational information that is needed for resilience planning. Additionally, the TRN Lite supplemental resources provide guidance on moving resilience solutions beyond conception to implementation and on how to make a business case for implementing those solutions.

11. What is the difference between a critical mission and a critical function?

    All organizations have missions or objectives that describe what they do and are trying to achieve. The TRN Lite uses the term critical mission to refer to an organizational goal or set of requirements of such high importance that it must be fulfilled. Critical functions are the specific procedures, tasks and decisions that ensure the critical mission will be sustained under all potential operating scenarios (i.e., normal operations, emergency operations, peak or high-tempo operations). Critical functions can include direct mission-support functions (e.g., analyze and provide intelligence, provide prison security, preserve genetic material), as well as operational support functions (e.g. provide emergency response). While the TRN Lite provides a framework for categorizing missions and functions as critical for the purposes of resilience planning, the approach is not prescriptive. Organizations are encouraged to use their existing designations of critical missions and functions if available, or to classify their missions and functions based on the unique characteristics of their site.

12. What are criticality weighting factors, and how are they used in the TRN Lite?

    A primary outcome of the TRN Lite Assessment is a risk score associated with energy or water loads supporting a critical function. The TRN Lite uses the term “criticality” to refer to the relative importance of a function or energy or water load (end use), given the site’s missions. While multiple functions could support a critical mission, the loss of some functions could have a more dramatic impact on the ability of a site to achieve its critical mission. To ensure that solutions aimed at safeguarding these most critical functions can later be prioritized, the TRN Lite allows users to apply criticality weighting factors to their critical functions. These critical function weightings can then be applied to each load that supports that function. Note that the risk assessment will favor projects that enhance resilience for critical functions with the highest criticality weighting over other projects with similar risk reduction potential. Large differences in the weights between different functions (e.g. 1, 10, 100) will result in a higher likelihood of prioritization for projects impacting highly critical functions relative to small differences in weights (e.g. 1, 2, 3). In the TRN Lite, the highest numerical weight represents the most critical function (e.g., a function weighted as a 10 will be calculated as more critical than a function weighted as a 1).

Detailed Information

13. How is tolerable outage duration (TOD) defined, and how should I calculate TOD for my various critical loads?

    The tolerable outage duration (TOD) is the amount of time that a critical load could be lost without unacceptable consequence to the critical function. TRN Lite users should consider two components when assigning a TOD to a critical load: 1) the duration of time for which the associated critical function may persist without the critical load, and 2) the site’s tolerance for the loss of the critical function. TOD is the sum of the answers to 1) and 2). TODs in the TRN Lite are measured in continuous time (e.g., 24 hours means one calendar day, not 24 business hours).

Disruptions

14. What do I do if my site does not have detailed hazard information for inclusion in the risk assessment?

    Users can start with the Identify Potential Hazards lookup, which is accessible as a standalone webpage or from within the Disruptions sub-section. This inbuilt functionality allows users to identify hazards that have historically occurred based on their facility’s zip-code. Users should choose to add only those hazards that also have the ability to affect their redundant supplies. In the TRN Lite, this is considered to be a “dual-impact hazard” as the hazard would have the potential to result in the loss of both primary supply and onsite redundant systems.

    Users can also add a second type of hazards and threats; “Grouped hazards and threats” are those that may disrupt primary energy or water supply for about the same outage duration but would not affect on-site redundant systems (this is sometimes called an “all-hazards” approach).