An Approach to Evaluating Resilience in Command and Control Architectures

From a national defense, as well as a civilian infrastructure perspective, a need exists to design and develop systems resilient to disruption. Disruptions are often difficult to predict or may be potentially unavoidable. Systems able to survive and recover from disruption are referred to as resilient. In the case of mission critical systems, such as command and control systems, resilience is a necessary characteristic and must be considered early in the development cycle. This paper describes a quantitative approach to evaluating the expected resilience of a command and control system. The approach uses a Petri Net based executable model of the system architecture. The rigorous graph-theoretic and executable properties of Petri Nets are leveraged to support static and dynamic measures of the attributes of resilience. These measures are then combined into a holistic evaluation of resilience for the command and control system under study. The evaluation results can then be used to support selection among alternative candidate architectures and to identify areas for improvement in the selected architecture.