ABSTRACT Understanding and managing modern systems is becoming more challenging as they grow in complexity and become more integrated, as emphasized in the INCOSE Systems Engineering Vision for 2035. These new challenges increase the risk of system failure. Resilience Engineering is a subfield within Systems Engineering that studies system performance in the face of disruptions. Due to the term resilience having multiple connotations, many methods measure resilience in systems differently. Moreover, traditional methods to measure resilience, such as linear recovery or probability‐based models, can become insufficient as systems grow in size, complexity, and nonlinearity. Bifurcation Analysis (BA) is a mathematical approach to understanding system behavior under changing conditions. BA is commonly used to study nonlinear systems and transition states known as bifurcations. While it has been extensively used in many fields, BA is not widely used in Resilience Engineering. This paper suggests the BARD—Bifurcation Analysis for Resilience Diagnostics—framework to aid Resilience Engineering practitioners in addressing system resilience in complex systems. While drawing from control theory, the framework is used solely as a diagnostic instrument to help system engineers identify risks and performance regimes; the framework does not attempt to design or tune control systems. The BARD framework is applied to two cases to demonstrate its uses and potential. Contributions are an overview of the current state of Resilience Engineering and Bifurcation Analysis, the introduction of BARD as a general‐use framework to assess resilience via Bifurcation Analysis, and two applications of the framework.
Otalvaro et al. (Fri,) studied this question.