Special Section on Resilience of Engineering Systems

Abstract

Our modern life has grown to depend on many and nearly ubiquitous large complex engineering systems, such as tunnels, gas/oil pipelines, geotechnical infrastructures, etc. All of these are the backbones of our modern society; therefore, complex real-world systems should not only be reliable, but also have high resilient capacity. Resilience is generally recognized as the ability of a critical infrastructure to recover from a disruptive event, and there is no doubt that we are experiencing a “resilience renaissance,” with attempts to embed system resilience almost everywhere for the well-being of our community. Therefore, analyzing and modeling the resilience of complex systems and networks have recently received significant interest from academia and industry. It has been recognized that such comprehensive development requires innovative theories, approaches, and technologies for resilient design and risk reduction for complex systems and networks. Such developments will facilitate further robust economic growth through resilient and efficient high-performance engineering systems. Additionally, developments should target resilient and cost-effective solutions to eliminate or reduce these vulnerabilities by making our complex systems and networks resilient at a minimum level of risk proneness. The goal is not to preserve existing systems, but to preserve and even enhance functions of critical high-technology systems, where failure consequences can be particularly severe. While qualitative assessment approaches are useful to understand how bad things are, quantitative assessment measures provide numerical estimation of system performance, time, and cost that are more meaningful to stakeholders.