Towards affordably adaptable and effective systems

Resilience means different things in different disciplines. From a systems engineering perspective, we define resilience as the ability of a system to adapt affordably and perform effectively across a wide range of operational contexts, where context is defined by mission, environment, threat, and force disposition. A key issue in engineering resilient systems is the lengthy and costly upfront engineering process, which program managers justifiably find unacceptable. This paper presents how advances in computational technology can potentially transform the system development process in new and novel ways to enable fast, efficient, and inexpensive upfront engineering—the key to engineering resilient systems. These processes, in turn, can enable rapid development, deployment, and operation of affordably adaptable and effective systems. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 16: 224–234, 2013