Properties and use of a resilience index in disaster preparation and response

We aim to contribute clarifying the concept of resilience and to introduce issues related to resilience computation. The contributions of this paper include interpretations of the resilience as a couple of largely dichotomic processes, the definition of several concepts related to resilience, the derivation of a set of properties of a resilience index previously introduced, an incipient study of the dynamics of the processes involved in resilience, and a simple model for optimal allocation of resources for improving resilience.