On the Importance of Resilience Engineering for Networked Systems in a Changing World

Resilience is featured increasingly often in the media, usually applied to society when faced, for example, with disasters such as flooding and the enormous challenges that the Covid-19 pandemic posed. There are now many resilience-related discussion groups worldwide, and some standards initiatives devoted in particular to city resilience. However, there is relatively little explicit interest in resilience engineering for communication networks and systems, including the Internet. This is perhaps surprising, given the reliance that society now places on networks and networked systems. This article reflects on key issues and developments that may change this perspective; we summarize recent and current research in resilient systems and, consequently, propose a multidisciplinary research agenda in resilience engineering for networked systems.