· · · Institutional Repository

Critical Infrastructures are the arteries and veins of Western, urbanized societies. The services and products provided by these large-scale, complex systems are considered essential. However, in recent years, more and more new problems seem to crop op after these infrastructures were opened up to market forces. What has happened in these critical infrastructures that we have come to depend upon? How did restructuring affect the reliability of their services? This study takes the reader beyond the debate between states and markets and focuses on the daily control and management of critical infrastructures - the world of control rooms. How has restructuring influenced the ability of those who operate these critical infrastructures to provide reliable services? And how do they cope with the effects of restructuring? Networked reliability presents first-hand accounts from electricity and telecommunications. It reconstructs the operations of the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) during California's electricity restructuring and the resulting electricity crisis. The second case study describes how KPN Mobile managed its mobile network in the liberalized mobile telphony market in the Netherlands. Networked reliability sheds new light on the effects of restructuring and institutional fragmentation in critical infrastructures that are of interest to reliability scholars, reliability professionals and policy makers involved in critical infrastructure restructuring. One of the most important findings is that the reliability of critical infrastructures becomes increasingly reliant on real-time control room operations. This study shows how those inside the control rooms employ unconventional means to ensure the reliable services under the increased volatility and unpredictability of their new environments.

In het Bestuurskunde themanummer over ‘spelsimulaties’ in 1995 werd een visionair beeld geschetst van het experimenteel oefenen van ‘virtual reality’. In dit artikel analyseren we of deze toekomstvisie is uitgekomen. Wat is de rol van serious gaming in crisismanagement en rampenbestrijding? Hoe écht is zo’n virtuele crisis nu precies? We laten we aan de hand van het gedachtegoed van Karl Weick en de game Dijk Patrouille zien dat gaming een betekenisverlenende methode is. Een virtuele crisis blijkt ‘echter’ dan we vaak beseffen. En in de nabije toekomst kan serious gaming mogelijk ook ingezet worden om crisisbesluitvormers te trainen.

Recent years have witnessed major governmental initiatives regarding Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP). At the same time, critical infrastructures have undergone massive institutional restructuring under the headings of privatization, deregulation and liberalization. Little research has gone into understanding the interactions between these two developments. In this article, we outline the consequences of institutional restructuring for the changing ways in which critical infrastructures ensure the reliability and security of their networks and services. Neither Normal Accident Theory nor High-Reliability Theory can account for reliability under these conditions. We then investigate the implications of these findings for Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP).

This paper reports on the current status of the restructured Dutch rail sector. We empirically studied the strategies traffic controllers display to cope with daily value-conflicts in rail operations, at infrastructure manager ProRail and train operating company NS. We use a new framework to identify types of coping behavior. The findings are put in a broader perspective and related to literature on the organization of large complex socio-technical systems. In conclusion, we suggest what to make of the current coping strategies and the changed complexity of managing train systems. Current developments seem to raise the level of system performance but ignore the operational context of coping, making the train system more brittle on the long term.

Sustainable mobility has proved to be a perennial challenge to realize. Scholars have argued that experiments could point the way forward towards sustainable mobility (cf. Loorbach, 2007, Markard and Truffer, 2008). In doing so, literature attributes a vital but complex task to those who engage in experiments. However, an important knowledge gap pertains to whether and how experiments contribute to learning about transitions and in what way they should be managed to break-up the more or less inertial mobility governance system. This paper aims to analyze how state-of-the-art literature on the governance of multi-actor systems considers experiments to contribute to transitions and highlight key dilemma’s that professionals engaged in the management of experimental face in the day-to-day management and decision making processes during the experiment. The paper will highlight these dilemmas and choices and illustrate their importance for experiments in the field of transportation and more specifically in the specific context of the Dutch mobility system and the TRANSUMO research program. Identifying these dilemma’s benefits practitioners who are engaged in the management of experiments to more consciously reflect on and include issues of second-order learning in the day-to-day management and decision making during the experiment to reach a more sustainable mobile system.