Rethinking Resilience Analytics
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- Published: Tuesday, 28 May 2019 07:51
A new academic paper published in the Risk Analysis journal ‘examines the efficacy of resilience analytics by answering a single motivating question: Can big data analytics help cyber–physical–social (CPS) systems adapt to surprise?’
Entitled ‘Rethinking Resilience Analytics’ the paper was authored by Daniel Eisenberg and David L. Alderson from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, US; and Thomas Seager from the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, Arizona State University, AZ, USA.
The article ‘explains the limitations of resilience analytics when critical infrastructure systems are challenged by fundamental surprises never conceived during model development. In these cases, adoption of resilience analytics may prove either useless for decision support or harmful by increasing dangers during unprecedented events’. It also demonstrates that these dangers are not limited to a single CPS context by highlighting the limits of analytic models during hurricanes, dam failures, blackouts, and stock market crashes.
The authors conclude that ‘resilience analytics alone are not able to adapt to the very events that motivate their use and may, ironically, make CPS systems more vulnerable’ and they present avenues for future research to address this deficiency, ‘with emphasis on improvisation to adapt CPS systems to fundamental surprise’.
