On the quantitative resilience assessment of complex engineered systems

Recent years have seen the increasing complexity of engineered systems. Complexity and uncertainty also exist in engineered systems’ interactions with human operators, managers, and the organization. Resilience, focusing on a system's ability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to, and recover from disruptive situations, can provide an umbrella concept that covers reliability and risk-based thinking to ensure these complex systems' safety. This paper discusses the quantitative aspects of the notion of resilience. Like the quantitative risk assessment framework, a generic framework should be developed for quantitative resilience assessment. This paper proposes a framework based on a triplet resilience definition consisting of disruption, functionality, and performance. Uncertainty treatment is also considered. The proposed framework aims to answer the question of “resilience of what to what” and how it can be quantitively assessed.