[SystemSafety] Paper on system and organisational resilience

[Vincenzo De Florio]

Dear Colleagues,

I'd like to share with you my latest paper, entitled "*On the Constituent
Attributes of Software and Organisational Resilience*". Please find herein
the abstract and a link.

Best regards,
Vincenzo.

Our societies are increasingly dependent on the services supplied by our
computers and their software. Forthcoming new technology is only
exacerbating this dependence by increasing the number, the performance, and
the degree of autonomy and inter-connectivity of software-empowered
computers and cyber-physical “things”, which translates into unprecedented
scenarios of interdependence. As a consequence, guaranteeing the
persistence-of-identity of individual and collective software systems and
software-backed organisations becomes an increasingly important
prerequisite towards sustaining the safety, security, and quality of the
computer services supporting human societies. Resilience is the term used
to refer to the ability of a system to retain its functional and
non-functional identity. In the present article we conjecture that a better
understanding of resilience may be reached by decomposing it into a number
of ancillary constituent properties, the same way as a better insight in
system dependability was obtained by breaking it down into safety,
availability, reliability, and other sub-properties. Three of the main
sub-properties of resilience proposed here refer respectively to the
ability to perceive environmental changes; to understand the implications
introduced by those changes; and to plan and enact adjustments intended to
improve the system-environment fit. A fourth property characterises the way
the above abilities manifest themselves in computer systems. The four
properties are then analyzed in three families of case studies, each
consisting of three software systems that embed different resilience
methods. Our major conclusion is that reasoning in terms of our resilience
sub-properties may help revealing the characteristics—and in particular the
limitations—of classic methods and tools meant to achieve system and
organisational resilience. We conclude by suggesting that our method may
prelude to meta-resilient systems—systems, that is, able to adjust
optimally their own resilience with respect to changing environmental
conditions.

http://www.pats.ua.ac.be/content/publications/2013/otcaosr-v2.4.pdf


-- 
Vincenzo De Florio
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