Scott Jackson

Towards a Conceptual Framework for Resilience Engineering

As systems continue to grow in size and complexity, they pose increasingly greater safety and risk management challenges. Today when complex systems fail and mishaps occur, there is an initial tendency to attribute the failure to human error. Yet research has repeatedly shown that more often than not it is not human error but organizational factors that set up adverse conditions that increase the likelihood of system failure. Resilience engineering is concerned with building systems that are able to circumvent accidents through anticipation, survive disruptions through recovery, and grow through adaptation. This paper defines resilience from different perspectives, provides a conceptual framework for understanding and analyzing disruptions, and presents principles and heuristics based on lessons learned that can be employed to build resilient systems.

Resilience principles for engineered systems

This paper examines a set of abstract, top-level principles and subprinciples collected from the literature to determine their usefulness in enabling the avoidance, survival, and recovery from disruptions caused by threats of various sources. The principles are compared to concrete solutions recommended by domain experts in various case studies and to the actual events in those case studies. Also examined are the limitations, conflicts, and vulnerabilities that may be apparent when concrete solutions are created from these principles. The systems considered are physical, organizational, and procedural systems. Examples include cases from fire protection, aviation, railways, and power distribution domains. Threats examined include terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and human and design error. Each principle is found to apply to different phases of the disruption cycle surrounding an encounter with a threat. It is found that principles, in general, cannot be applied singly to a system but must be combined with other principles to enable resilience. System developers in various domains can use the principles to create concrete solutions to characterize a particular system, model that solution, and determine the degree of recovery of the system from a specified threat. ©2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 16

A research agenda for systems of systems architecting

This paper documents the activity of a workshop on defining a research agenda for Systems of Systems (SoS) Architecting, which was held at USC in October 2006. After two days of invited talks on critical success factors for SoS engineering, the authors of this paper convened for one day to brainstorm topics for the purpose of shaping the near-term research agenda of the newly convened USC Center for Systems & Software Engineering. The output from the workshop is a list of ten high-impact items with corresponding research challenges in the context of SoS Architecting. Each item includes a description of the research challenges, its link to contemporary academic or industrial problems, and reasons for advocacy of that area. The items were assessed in terms of value and difficulty to determine a prioritization both for the CSSEs future research agenda and for others in the field.