A Multicriteria Decision Analytic Approach to Systems Resilience

This article develops a novel decision-oriented framework that strategically deconstructs systems resilience in a way that focuses on systems’ design, capabilities, and management. The framework helps evaluate and compare how system design choices impact system resilience. First, we propose a resilience score based on a piecewise linear approximation to a resilience curve. Using multicriteria decision analysis principles, we score system design alternatives in terms of system-specific capabilities. We estimate the relevance of these capabilities to resilience curve parameters associated with resilience phases. Finally, we interpret the derivatives of resilience with respect to the curve parameter values as the leverage of these parameters. Using multiple levels of weighted sums of the scores, we calculate the first order impact of system design choices first on a proxy for the generic resilience parameters and then on resilience, which allows situational characteristics to be incorporated in their natural terminology while mapping their impact on resilience with a traceable logic. We illustrate the approach by using existing materials to develop an example comparing engineered designs for minimizing post-wildfire flood impacts.