Toward a Resilience Framework for Sustainable Engineered Systems

We discuss the development of sustainable engineered systems (SES) using emergent features of complex systems: large and diffused information content, non-linear causality, time lags in response to forcing functions, diffused control hierarchy, and uncertainty in end-points. If SES are to maintain their performance indicators over long durations, their success should be defined by the ability to monitor the changing risk profile and take timely actions to prevent the likelihood of failure. Resilience engineering (RE) is a new systems engineering design approach that takes into consideration such likelihoods and provides ways of generating prevention schemas before perturbations turn into system failures. We intend to extend the notions provided by RE into the SES conceptualization.