Static Resilience of Large Flexible Engineering Systems: Axiomatic Design Model and Measures

Our modern life has grown to depend on many and nearly ubiquitous large complex engineering systems. Many disciplines now seemingly ask the same question: "In the face of assumed disruption, to what degree will these systems continue to perform and when will they be able to bounce back to normal operation." This paper seeks to partially fulfill this need with static resilience measures for large flexible engineering systems based upon an axiomatic design model. This development is founded upon graph theory and axiomatic design for large flexible engineering systems (LFESs). Central to the development is the concept of structural degrees of freedom as the available combinations of system processes and resources, which could be individually measured to describe system capabilities or sequentiallymeasured to give a sense of the skeleton of a system's behavior. This approach facilitates the enumeration of service paths through an LFES, along which valuable artifacts flow. Therefore, this work compares the value and quantity of service paths before and after a disruption as measures of static resilience or survivability. To complete the contribution, a full illustrative example from the production system domain is given.