Formalization of questionnaire-based score card risk control and resilience assessment for critical infrastructure operators and companies countering Covid-19

Questions and answers are a fast way to assess complex day-to-day situations. They can be adopted to the framing conditions and are path-dependent, allowing in-depth analysis of critical issues. Questionnaires try to take up the natural setting using pre-defined sets of questions that cover an area. Often, for comparison of results, they use fixed sets of questions. The paper shows how to use questionnaires to determine semi-quantitative scores of socio technical systems to assess the status of their risk and resilience analysis and management. It maps qualitative as well as quantitative questions on semi-quantitative scales at different system and analysis levels up to overall assessment level. Main focus is on a formalism that allows a dimensional analysis of ordered sets of questions. To this end the questions are related to resilience and risk dimensions understood as concepts allowing a semi-quantitative multiple binning of results, e.g., an answer can be attributed to one or more risk management phases, to resilience cycle or catastrophe management cycle phases, to system layers, and/or to technical resilience capabilities. This allows the simultaneous use of several risk control and resilience generation frameworks, analysis and management concepts. It is shown how extensive quantities are defined that do not depend on the number of questions using normalization conditions. Thus, the user can remove predefined and add new questions as appropriate. The approach is applied to the critical infrastructure domain and to companies affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.