Resilience of Complex Adaptive Systems: A Pedagogical Framework for Engineering Education and Research

The discourse on resilience, currently at the forefront of research and implementation in a wide variety of fields, is confusing because of its multi-disciplinary/spatial/temporal nature. Resilience analysis is a discipline that allows the assessment and enhancement of the coping and recovery behaviors of systems when subjected to short-lived high-impact external shocks leading to partial or complete failure. This paper, meant for pedagogical teaching and research formulation, starts by providing an overview of different aspects of resilience in general and then focuses on communities and regions that are complex adaptive systems (CAS) involving multiple engineered infrastructures providing essential services to local inhabitants and adapted to available natural resources and social requirements. Next, for objective analysis and assessment, it is proposed that resilience be characterized by four different quantifiable sub-attributes. This paper then describes the standard technocentric manner in which different temporal phases during and in the aftermath of disasters are generally visualized and analyzed, and discusses how these relate to reliability and risk analyses. Subsequently, two prevalent types of frameworks are described and representative literature reviewed: (i) those that aim at improving general resilience via soft methods such as subjective means (interviews, narratives) and census data, and (ii) those that are meant to enhance specific resilience under certain threat scenarios using hard/objective methods such as data-driven analysis and performance-predictive modeling methods, akin to resource allocation problems in operations research. Finally, the need for research into an integrated framework is urged; one that could potentially combine the strengths of both approaches.