The role of protocol layers and macro-cognitive functions in engineered system resilience

Engineered system resilience has emerged as an important concept for researchers, policy makers, and managers over the past two decades. It is critical to the operation of complex systems that are crucial to social and economic systems, such as interdependent critical infrastructures. While the measurement of infrastructure resilience is well-studied, in this paper the authors present the concept that a system's selected strategy for self-organizing is the mechanism for contending with unanticipated events. Self-organizing is a fundamental activity of temporarily modifying system processes and inter-organizational relationships to better respond to a disruptive event. The authors build on existing concepts of how complex systems manage resilience, and illustrate the new concept in the context of transportation networks. If strategies for self-organizing exist, they can be defined and characterized into a limited number of archetypes. This paper develops the concept of self-organizing as an important part of resilience management, and presents two illustrative case studies which are early attempts to characterize these strategies [4]. Understanding strategies for re-organization may help to improve understanding of how traditional resilience metrics are applied or how risk is assessed and managed in complex systems, by providing a context for how decision makers manage responses under uncertain circumstances.