Operationalizing human factors in critical infrastructure resilience stress testing: a research agenda

Abstract

Resilience stress testing has emerged as an established method for evaluating how critical infrastructure performs under disruption. Methods that have matured around it parameterize physical components in detail while representing operators as constants, abstractions, or sources of error. Human performance variability deserves analytical treatment comparable to that given to physical assets. We define human factors here as the cognitive, behavioral, and organizational characteristics of operators, supervisors, and decision-makers that shape system response. The paper reviews prior efforts to integrate human factors with infrastructure resilience analysis, identifies where those efforts fall short at the operational layer, and sets out five research priorities: measurement that is feasible at operational scale; data practices that turn existing records into modeling-ready inputs; hybrid modeling that combines agent-based, system dynamics, and network methods; cross-scale and cross-domain integration that does not overstate transferability; and governance that protects both data quality and the people who generate it. Human performance can be quantified in forms that operators will adopt, provided the tools fit operational reality.