Four concepts for resilience and the implications for the future of resilience engineering

摘要

The concept of system resilience is important and popular in fact, hyper-popular over the last few years. Clarifying the technical meanings and foundations of the concept of resilience would appear to be necessary. Proposals for defining resilience are flourishing as well. This paper organizes the different technical approaches to the question of what is resilience and how to engineer it in complex adaptive systems. This paper groups the different uses of the label 'resilience' around four basic concepts: (1) resilience as rebound from trauma and return to equilibrium; (2) resilience as a synonym for robustness; (3) resilience as the opposite of brittleness, i.e., as graceful extensibility when surprise challenges boundaries; (4) resilience as network architectures that can sustain the ability to adapt to future surprises as conditions evolve. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.