Combinatorial Methods for Enhancing the Resilience of Production Facilities

In this paper, we apply combinatorial methods to generate crisis scenarios for production facilities with the goal of strengthening their resilience by identifying weaknesses in operational aspects or crisis response plans, extending previous work from the domain of disaster research. We use notions of combinatorial coverage for quantifying diversity in scenarios and as one objective when sampling the considered scenario space. We report on a small case study targeting the resilience of a production facility. Specifically, we generated covering arrays of different strengths (for five ternary parameters, for strengths two to five) to obtain paths through the production chain and various combinatorial sequence test sets to obtain crisis scenarios (sequence covering arrays for twelve events of strengths two and three as well as sequence test sets with constraints of length six and seven featuring different constraints). Finally, we state reflections as well as practical feedback to the proposed combinatorial approach.