Resilience Engineering
Resilience engineering focuses on designing electronic systems and organizations that can absorb disturbances, adapt to changing conditions, and recover rapidly from disruptions while maintaining essential functions. Unlike traditional reliability engineering which emphasizes preventing failures, resilience engineering acknowledges that failures are inevitable in complex systems and prepares for continued operation despite adversity.
The discipline of resilience engineering draws from safety science, systems theory, organizational psychology, and complex adaptive systems research. For electronic systems, resilience encompasses not only technical fault tolerance but also the organizational capabilities, processes, and human factors that enable systems to respond effectively to unexpected situations. Resilient systems are characterized by their ability to anticipate potential threats, monitor system state, respond to disturbances, and learn from experience.
Articles
Adaptive Capacity Development
Build system flexibility through brittleness analysis, graceful extensibility design, sustained adaptability methods, cognitive systems engineering, work-as-imagined versus work-as-done understanding, resilience indicators, stress testing, boundary objects, cross-scale interactions, emergence management, variety engineering, adaptive management, and organizational flexibility techniques that enable systems and organizations to handle challenges beyond their original design envelope.
Antifragility Implementation
Gain from disorder. This section covers stressor identification, hormesis principles, redundancy versus optionality, barbell strategies, skin in the game, via negativa approaches, convexity detection, volatility harvesting, decentralization benefits, modularity advantages, overcompensation mechanisms, evolutionary approaches, trial and error, and tinkering strategies.
Black Swan and Gray Rhino Events
Prepare for the unexpected. Coverage encompasses scenario planning, war gaming, red team exercises, weak signal detection, early warning systems, crisis management, command and control, decision making under uncertainty, resource allocation, public communication, regulatory compliance, legal considerations, reputation management, and organizational learning.
Recovery and Restoration
Bounce back from disruptions. Topics include recovery time objectives, recovery point objectives, restoration priorities, dependency mapping, critical path analysis, resource mobilization, communication protocols, stakeholder management, damage assessment, temporary operations, permanent restoration, lessons learned, improvement implementation, and resilience metrics.
About This Category
Resilience Engineering represents an evolution in thinking about system dependability. Traditional reliability engineering focuses on preventing failures through robust design, quality components, and thorough testing. While these practices remain essential, resilience engineering extends the focus to include what happens when prevention fails. Complex electronic systems operating in dynamic environments will inevitably encounter situations their designers did not anticipate. Resilient systems maintain essential functions through these encounters.
The principles covered in this category apply across all electronic systems from embedded devices to enterprise infrastructure. Organizations that develop resilience capabilities protect themselves against the inevitable disruptions that complex systems experience while building the adaptive capacity to thrive in changing circumstances.