A conceptual framework for resilience: fundamental definitions, strategies and metrics

The resilience system property has become more and more relevant, mainly because of the increasing dependance on a rapidly growing number of software-intensive, complex, socio-technical systems, which are facing uncertainty about changes they are expected to experience during their life-cycle and ways to deal with them. Methodologies for the systematic design and validation of resilience for such systems are thus highly necessary, and require contributions from several different fields. This paper contributes to current resilience research by providing a conceptual framework intended to serve as a common ground for the development of such methodologies. Its main points are: the identification of the main categories of changes a system should face; a clear definition of the different facets of resilience one could want to achieve, expressed in terms of the system dynamics; a mapping of each of these facets to design strategies that are better suited to achieve it; and the corresponding identification of possible metrics that can be used to assess its achievement.