Towards a novel and applicable approach for Resilience Engineering

Resilience Engineering can provide society and its critical infrastructure and systems with means, methods and technologies to overcome disruptions with as less harm as possible. In this context it is of utmost importance to identify ways to strengthen the adaptive capacity of up to complex socio technical systems. We try to establish Resilience Engineering as away of thinking that enables engineers to use their scientific expertise, creative ingenuity and help society to develop tools to handle all kinds of adverse events properly - from critical system disruptions, natural disasters, global terrorism to large-scale infrastructure failure. For that purpose, we suggest to deliberately limit the scope of Resilience Engineering towards engineering, i.e. mainly technological solutions, in contrast to the main body of Resilience Engineering literature. By that we try to pave the way for the next generation of engineers dealing with the extension from risk analysis and management towards resilience thinking. In short, Resilience Engineering means preserving critical functionality, ensuring graceful degradation and enabling fast recovery of systems with the help of engineered generic capabilities as well as customized technological solutions when the systems witness problems, unexpected disruptions or unexampled events. One central aspect of Resilience Engineering is the ability to quantify and measure resilience. Only adequate and valid indicators will give us the chance for comparatively and absolutely analyzing various systems with respect to their specific resilience. Finally, we need to be able to develop advanced methods for modelling and simulating, in particular for complex systems and their resilience towards adverse events. The presentation will hint at opportunities and research necessities for developing a new and integrated approach to model, simulate and improve the resilience of complex, interdependent, sociotechnical systems