Optimizing Resilience When Designing Engineered Systems

Engineering design increasingly seeks to design resilient systems that can withstand adverse events and recover from the effects of the adverse events. The value-driven design for resilience (VD2R) framework enables the assessment of system resilience and the optimization of decision variables (or design characteristics) that maximize the value of the system for a firm. The VD2R framework it assesses the time-dependent resilience of an engineered system by explicitly modeling the redundancy, robustness, and recoverability of the system. This assessment captures the uncertain behavior of degradation and restoration and their impact on system resilience. Second, it encompasses a value model that links time-dependent system resilience to a design firm’s future profit. The firm can consider the trade-offs between designing a more resilient but costly system and generating less profit after the system is fielded. It facilitates the understanding of how resilience adds value to a firm, a key enabler for determining the optimal level of system resilience. The proposed framework is demonstrated with an illustrative case study, where the resilience of a series-parallel system is modeled and its design characteristics optimized.