A Resilience-Oriented Screening Framework for Critical Infrastructure Power Supply Against High-Impact Low-Probability Disruptions: A Case Study from Poland

Increasing high-impact, low-probability (HILP) disruptions requires a paradigm shift in emergency power for critical infrastructure (CI), moving away from traditional cost-driven assessments toward physical resilience. Existing multi-criteria decision frameworks for microgrid technology selection typically treat survivability as one criterion among several, with economic performance retained as an equal or dominant factor. This study addresses this gap by inverting that hierarchy: it develops a resilience-oriented, two-stage screening framework that prequalifies energy technologies (including CHP and CCHP) for CI facing prolonged outages based exclusively on survivability criteria, deferring economic optimization to later design stages. The methodology prioritizes islanding readiness, black-start capability, fuel autonomy, multi-vectorr energy coverage, implementation feasibility, and operational safety. A hospital serves as the reference CI due to its rigorous demand for simultaneous electricity, heat, cooling, and process loads. The framework applies a Stage I Go/No-Go boundary filter followed by a Stage II weighted scoring matrix, evaluating a broad technology basket encompassing gas, biogas, and biomass CHP, CCHP with absorption cooling, hybrid CHP/BESSs, RESs + BESSs, and diesel generators. Rather than providing a definitive techno-economic ranking, this study contributes a transparent, replicable, front-end engineering tool that can be generalized to other critical infrastructure classes. The results define boundary conditions for prequalifying multi-vector energy architectures, establishing a foundation for future FEED-stage modeling and dynamic simulation of CI microgrids.