The Modulus of Resilience for Critical Subsystems

Accelerating digitization of critical infrastructures is increasing interconnection and interdependence among high-reliability subsystems. The resulting dependencies create new challenges in preventing underinvestment in high impact, low probability (HILP) events which can have disastrous consequences for society's critical subsystems. These more impactful events highlight the differences between reliability and resiliency, with the latter applicable to black swans. A number of approaches for quantifying resiliency have been proposed; however, a review of literature identified conceptual gaps when applied to empirical event data. This chapter provides a scenario agnostic method to quantify resiliency by applying concepts from materials science in a generalized form. This new formulation resulted from a mapping of constructs used in tensile testing to characteristics of protracted subsystem disruptions. Based on the mapping and gap analysis, a resiliency index calculation was developed and applied using examples based on empirical data from high impact events.