Design of resilient and sustainable complex engineered systems

Abstract

With the development of new complex engineered systems or retrofitting the old ones, new types of safety issues and unforeseen failure modes may have arisen. Traditional probabilistic risk assessment framework falls short in evaluating the risks involved in the unexpected adverse failure events, such as those major failures induced by nature. Focusing on failure prevention and recovery efforts, the concept of resilience provides a new way to cope with system complexity and failures. A resilient system is a system that possesses the ability to survive and recover from the likelihood of failures due to disruptive events. The design concept that incorporates resiliency into engineering practices is known as engineering resilience. Despite an increase in the usage of engineering resilience concept, the diversity of its applications in various engineering sectors complicates a universal agreement on its quantification and associated measurement techniques. Thus, there is a pressing need to develop a generally applicable engineering resilience analysis framework. This dissertation proposes enhanced predictive engineering resilience analysis frameworks, which include the modeling, assessment, allocation, and improvement in designing resilient systems for a broader engineering discipline. The presented study also expects to serve as a building block toward developing resilient and sustainable complex engineered systems.