1.3 System Resilience: Capabilities, Culture and Infrastructure

Abstract System resilience is the ability of organizational, hardware and software systems to mitigate the severity and likelihood of failures or losses, to adapt to changing conditions, and to respond appropriately after the fact. Challenger, Columbia, Chernobyl and Bhopal are examples of such failures. System resilience goes beyond traditional disciplines, such as reliability and system safety to achieve its goal. System resilience employs systems engineering principles at product and infrastructure levels. The infrastructure system includes such nodes as the developer, the customer, the user, the maintainer, and the operator. System resilience requires that systems engineering principles be practiced across organizational boundaries and to a greater level of detail than is common in today's world. System resilience depends on developing beneficial paradigms within all nodes of the infrastructure. Finally, system resilience requires that all nodes of the infrastructure system have a set of capabilities that are directly derivable from root causes of catastrophes. The combination of capabilities, culture and infrastructure forms the basic framework of system resilience. A key aspect of catastrophes is emergence, that is, the negative interaction among two or more elements of the system, who, when acting alone perform benignly. Prediction of emergence and design against emergence is a major challenge of resilience. Adaptability is the characteristic of a system that allows it to survive a catastrophe. Although rules for the creation of adaptability in human‐intensive systems have been formulated, similar rules for hardware and software systems are in their infancy.