Safeware: system safety and computers
Safeware: system safety and computers
HOTOS '01 Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems
Transdisciplinarity: Reaching Beyond Disciplines To Find Connections
Journal of Integrated Design & Process Science
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System resilience is the ability of organizational, hardware and software systems to mitigate the severity and likelihood of failures or losses, to adapt to changing conditions, and to respond appropriately after the fact. Challenger, Columbia, Chernobyl and Bhopal are examples of such failures. System resilience goes beyond traditional disciplines, such as reliability and system safety to achieve its goal. System resilience requires that technical and managerial processes be executed as a unified whole. System resilience employs the systems approach at product and infrastructure levels. The infrastructure system includes such nodes as the developer, the customer, the user, the maintainer, and the operator. System resilience requires that systems engineering principles be practiced across organizational boundaries and to a greater level of detail than is common in today's world. System resilience incorporates the principles of organizational psychology to develop beneficial paradigms within all nodes of the infrastructure. The combination of capabilities, culture and infrastructure forms the basic framework of system resilience. A key aspect of catastrophes is emergence, that is, characteristics of a system that cannot be predicted from the characteristics of the components. Sometimes emergence results from the negative interaction among two or more elements of the system, which, when acting alone, perform benignly. While positive, or desirable, emergence is widely studied, negative, or undesirable, emergence is of interest in the study of resilience. Prediction of emergence and design of adaptive systems that will survive emergent events is a major challenge of resilience. Adaptability, agility and robustness are the characteristics of a system that allow it to survive a disruption. Although the principles of adaptability, agility and robustness have been formulated and shown to reflect the characteristics of systems that have survived disruption, the actual implementation of them lie largely in the heuristics of systems architecting.