Charter
The purpose of the Resilient Systems Working Group is to use systems engineering principles to enhance the resilience of systems to reduce the likelihood of and to recover from disasters. Resilience is the ability of organizational, hardware and software systems to mitigate the severity and likelihood of failures or losses, to adapt to changing conditions, and to respond appropriately after the fact. The study of system resilience includes the creation of a robust infrastructure that designs, builds, tests, maintains, and operates the system. The scope is larger than design, reliability, human factors or system safety. It is an infrastructure wide topic to include customers, developers, suppliers, and all other stakeholders. System resilience has a large interest in cultural, sociological and psychological causes of human-made disasters. Hence, it is truly multidisciplinary. The Resilient Systems Working Group is a part of the INCOSE Public Interest Sector.

Contact Resilient Systems Working Group for additional information or to join this group.

Accomplishments and Products
The Resilient Systems Working Group (RSWG) had a successful meeting in Albuquerque with 16 participants. Most of the time was spent discussing what resilience is and reviewing a presentation on resilience. This presentation summarized conclusions from Challenger, Columbia, Chernobyl, 9/11, Katrina and other events. Resilience is the ability of organizational, hardware and software systems to mitigate the severity and likelihood of failures or losses, to adapt to changing conditions, and to respond appropriately after the fact. This definition has not been officially adopted by the group. Such concepts as emergence, complexity and adaptability figure heavily in resilience. The group discussed many products but decided that first priority would be given to a lexicon and to an expanded bibliography. The Resilient Systems Working Group is a node in the international Resilience Engineering Network. The group also has a relationship with the Robust Systems Working Group of the Association Française d’Ingénierie Système (AFIS), the French equivalent of INCOSE.

The URL for the Resilience Engineering Network is: www.resilience-engineering.org. The Proceedings for the Second Symposium on Resilience Engineering in November of 2006 in Juan-les-Pins, France can be found on this site.

The book Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts can be ordered from Ashgate Publishing Limited from the following site: www.ashgate.com.

Resilience Lexicon. Project Leader - Rick Dove. This project will capture the unique words and definitions associated with resilience.

Expanded Resilience Bibliography. Project Leader - Duarte Gonçalves. This project will documentthe many articles and books associated with resilience. It will also provide a short paragraph describing the content and value of each article or book.

Resilience Report. Project Leader - Scott Jackson. The purpose of this project will be to develop a report on resilience that will be understandable by the public and political decision makers. This is a long-term project and will follow the completion of the Lexicon and the Expanded Bibliography.