Resilience is defined as the ability of a system to perform and maintain its functions in routine, as well as unexpected circumstances. Or in other words, the overall resilience of a treatment facility combines the performance of the treatment process with the availability of the associated critical equipment.
As such, compliance to increasingly rigorous performance expectations will not be achieved on a consistent basis without processes that can treat to the required standards and equipment and systems that ensure continued operation at the necessary levels under all reasonable circumstances.
The evaluation of the resilience of a treatment facility should be an important part of its design and operation. However, this has traditionally been difficult to assess and quantify, and as a consequence its management has largely been ignored, or has been reduced to a function of how many treatment stages are provided with redundancy and/ or backup “stand-by” facilities.
Without proper resilience assessment there will always be a tendency to default to a “belt and braces” approach as a means of managing the compliance risk, leading to “gold-plate” engineering, with specifications much higher than the business need. This in turn leads to higher capital expenditure and operational costs over the life of a treatment asset.
Resilience assessment and modelling allows a more effective selection of processes and treatment schemes, as well as providing a critical means of influencing and assessing investment decisions and operational and maintenance planning in order to minimise the overall cost of compliance.
