Resilient Systems

This book adopts a case-based or story-based approach to addressing questions such as what happens when we cannot fix failures in the sense of returning the system to “normal” operations in less than many years or maybe decades, or perhaps never, or how do we recognize that we are facing pervasive failures? Can we develop evidence-based resilience to mitigate the consequences of pervasive failures? The five domains explored herein include banking and finance, environment, health and well-being, infrastructure, and organizations. Each of chapters begins with a lead story that in one way or another, involved the author. Beyond these lead stories, the book discusses over 40 other cases in these domains. Dr. Rouse articulates an analytic framework for characterizing stories including ten central questions, as well as a multi-level modeling construct extended to address wicked problems and complex adaptive systems. This provides the foundation for outlining, in the last chapter, an integrated approach to decision support to enable evidence-based resilience for all the cases discussed. USP : Fosters an understanding of pervasive failures that cannot be fixed as a phenomena in and of themselves; Provides a framework for analysis of pervasive failures along with methods and tools for managing such occurrences; Reinforces concepts presented across various domains with a rich set of fascinating real-life case studies.