Impact of social behavior for critical infrastructure resilience

Technological progress is considered to be the key factor of our social as well as economic wealth. As new technologies and developments are an ubiquitous part of our daily life their fallibilty becomes more aware to us. E.g., the smart grid technology represents an essential aspect of the future transmission grid and requires the end user’s acceptance to assure the resilience of the future power grid. In particular public concerns could threaten the resilience of critical infrastructure due to social amplification proccesses in the perceiption of risks. In this work an introduction to conventional risk analysis is given and its drawbacks are explained using the prospect theory. The conceptual framework of social risk amplification is utilised to describe how minor risks could elicit great public concerns. Finally a use case shows how indicators could measure the social amplification process and which analytic potentials are provided by social media.