Analysis of Resilience Situations for Complex Engineered Systems – the Resilience Holon

Improving the resilience of complex engineered and engineering systems (CES) includes planning for complex resilience situations, in which there may be multiple threats, interactions, and disruptions. One challenge in the modeling of CES is the identification of how interactions in a complex situation occur and their combined influence on CES resilience. This article presents a resilience holon that can be used to analyze complex resilience situations. It is made up of 24 elements (defining types of resilience, threats, interactions, and disruptions), which have varying importance to specific situations. Holons can be linked together hierarchically or in a network. An application of the resilience holon to a documented real-world resilience situation, widespread flooding in a city, illustrates its use. Pathways taken by threats and disruptions, as the flood effects cascaded through the city, are shown as connections between holons. The resilience holon could be used to decompose diverse resilience situations involving CES, to identify where critical vulnerability points are and how the whole resilience situation could be improved. The visual nature of the resilience holon could be used in an interactive way, allowing stakeholders to better understand the full resilience picture of CES that they use or operate.