SYSTEMS RESILIENCE: DEFINITION, MODELING AND ITS QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS

Abstract

Critical infrastructure systems are essential for the survival of our society. In recent years, resilience has been considered an effective approach to enable these systems to recover from disruptions. Although a vast related literature has been produced in the last decades, a unifying framework in defining and measuring resilience is still lacking. The main contribution of this thesis is a unifying framework in defining resilience and associated tools for its measurement. First, we propose a unifying framework for defining resilience. Second, we develop recovery functions to model the recovery process, which describes the capability of a system to restore its performance after a disruption. Lastly, we apply the proposed resilience assessment tool to a water distribution system subject to water leaks. The case study shows that the proposed tool is useful to characterize system responses under different disruption scenarios and support the identification of areas for improvement within various aspects of a system’s resilience.