A resilience glossary shaped by context: Reviewing resilience-related terms for critical infrastructures

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive and context-sensitive resilience glossary for critical infrastructures by synthesizing diverse definitions, clarifying terminology, and outlining a specific understanding of resilience as system capacity to handle unforeseen disruptions.

Contribution

It creates a unified resilience terminology for critical infrastructures by integrating and comparing multiple definitions and contrasting views from existing literature.

Findings

Resilience is defined as a system's ability to handle unforeseen disruptive events.

The glossary includes 91 definitions of resilience-related terms.

Resilience comprises three pillar capacities measurable from performance curves.

Abstract

We present a comprehensive resilience glossary, comprising a set of 91 definitions of resilience-related terms used in the context of critical infrastructures. The definition and use of many of these terms, as well as the term resilience itself, shows an enormous variability in the literature. Therefore, we draw from the diverse pool of published definitions, integrate multiple contrasting views, compare the individual terms, and provide references to adjoining or contesting views, to create a clear resilience terminology. This terminology outlines a specific understanding of resilience which supports the effective assessment and management of the resilience of critical infrastructures. The two central elements of this understanding are that (1) resilience is the ability of a system to deal with the impacts of unspecific and possibly unforeseen disruptive events, and that (2) this ability comprises three pillar capacities whose quality can be extracted from performance curves.