Overview¶
Operational Resilience Engineering (ORE) is a developing research framework that connects operations research and resilience engineering.
ORE asks how critical operational systems can be represented, evaluated, and improved when they encounter disruption, changing demands, uncertain conditions, and limits in available adaptive capacity.
The framework focuses on the relationships among:
System states and transitions.
Performance values and operational boundaries.
Vulnerability and resilience as related but distinct analytical spaces.
Feasible designs, strategies, and interventions.
Interpretive perspectives that shape what is treated as operational, degraded, acceptable, or in need of change.
ORE is intended to support formal analysis of critical infrastructure and other interdependent systems while retaining the fact that operational judgment, constraints, and perspective shape decisions.
The core formulation¶
Operations Research + Resilience Engineering = Operational Resilience Engineering
ORE uses operations research to make decision spaces, constraints, feasible actions, and performance consequences explicit. It uses resilience engineering to examine how systems continue, stretch, recover, and change when confronted with disruption and surprise.
The framework¶
ORE develops a paired account of vulnerability and resilience.
Vulnerability concerns the conditions, boundaries, constraints, and interpretations through which a system may become unable to sustain acceptable operation. Resilience concerns the capacities and interventions through which a system can preserve, extend, recover, or improve acceptable operation.
These concepts are mutually constitutive: how a system’s vulnerability is defined shapes what counts as resilience, and an account of resilience reveals which vulnerabilities matter for a given operational perspective.
The Theory page introduces the two (2 times 2) frameworks that organize this developing formulation.