Resilience Engineering as Part of Security Research: Definitions, Concepts and Science Approaches

Abstract

This article focuses on the rather new concept of Resilience Engineering (RE). Resilience has emerged as a special concept within the vast area of civil security research. Resilience Engineering can provide society and its critical infrastructure with means, methods and technologies to overcome unexampled events with as less harm as possible and to come out even stronger and better prepared afterwards. Civil security research has tended to focus on specific threats. The concept of resilience, by contrast, is inherently holistic. After all, it is about securing the well-being of people. We try to establish RE as a way of thinking that enables us to handle all kinds of adverse events properly. To answer the question about the understanding what RE really is, this article gives an overview of some of the most important developments and definitions concerning resilience. In contrast to the most common focus on human factors in areas like aviation safety, air traffic management (ATM), maritime safety and patient safety we rather suggest to deliberately limit the scope of Resilience Engineering. This limitation—which is necessarily vague due to the nature of resilience as a concept—allows us to distinguish between several ways to enhance the resilience of complex systems. For RE, there needs to be a clear focus on engineering. Resilience Engineering means preserving critical functionality, ensuring graceful degradation and enabling fast recovery of complex systems with the help of engineered generic capabilities as well as customized technological solutions when the systems witness problems, unexpected disruptions or unexampled events. Finally, the important aspect of a quantitative description of resilience via mathematical modelling of complex systems is introduced. The aim is to produce multimodal simulations that use an integrated approach to model technological and social systems and the complex interactions between them.