Engineering Resilience for Complex Systems

This paper will explore the concept of resilience from its roots in ecology to the application of this ecological concept of resilience to social and community resilience in the context of climate change. In this context, resilience is seen as a property of complex adaptive communities rather than of individuals. This paper will explore how this ecological concept of resilience has been taken up both by climate adaptation research and by the Transition Town movement. This ecological concept of resilience is at odds with the individualism of both psychological and economic approaches to resilience in relation to climate change.

Engineered Resilient Systems: A DoD Perspective

This is an excellent time for engineering design research. Not only is the National Science Foundation continuing its strong support for fundamental research in design but also the Department of Defense is pulling together a major new program in Engineered Resilient Systems at a level of funding that can completely change the field, and NASA's Langley Research Center is considering a new research thrust in complex engineered systems. Also, the Department of Defense sponsored Systems Engineering Research Center, a consortium of about two dozen universities, led by the Stevens Institute of Technology is conducting a substantial number of high quality research programs in systems engineering and continues to receive robust funding. And the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Adaptive Vehicle Make program is committing hundreds of millions of dollars to demonstrate a radically new approach to design and development of complex systems.The impetus for all this funding is a crying need for more effective design. Research from my group at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, to be presented at this year's Conference on Systems Engineering Research, shows that the Department of Defense loses about $200 million per day in major weapon system cost overruns, program delays, and program reductions or cancellations. Experiences at NASA and Boeing, and at similar organizations outside the United States are essentially the same, although the Pentagon's programs are larger, more numerous, and better documented in the open literature (which is why we study them). I believe that the problems experienced by these programs are due to ineffective methods, processes, and tools.It is fair to ask how this can be, when the pages of this Journal are mainly devoted to disseminating the discovery and construction of design methods, processes, and tools. I see two reasons why our work to date has failed to stanch the bleeding of our largest engineering efforts. First, we do not have a way to measure the quality of methods, processes, and tools against a rigorous, widely accepted theory of design—in fact, we do not have such a theory. For large design projects performed within big organizations, we have hardly any theory useful for validating or comparing design methods. Second, the design theories we have do not sufficiently recognize the human, social, and organizational aspects of creating large systems.These two reasons are not problems for our research community. Instead, they are opportunities. We now have some nascent design theories circulating in our community with rigorous, sound foundations. The work is far from complete, but I think we have shown that we are up to it. And, we are making steady progress integrating learning from the social sciences into our design research. In fact, social-science based or linked design research is not at all new, but I believe it will become much more pervasive in the next few years.This is a new dawn in engineering design. Our field is on the verge of rapid growth into many deeply interesting areas. Hold your hats.Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this piece are the author's alone. They do not necessarily reflect any positions of the National Science Foundation.

The term resilience describes stress-response patterns across scientific disciplines. In ecology, advances have been made to clearly define resilience based on underlying mechanistic assumptions. Engineering resilience (rebound) is used to describe the ability of organisms to recover from adverse conditions (disturbances), which is termed the rate of recovery. By contrast, the ecological resilience definition considers a systemic change, that is, when ecosystems reorganize into a new regime following disturbance. Under this new regime, structural and functional aspects change considerably relative to the previous regime, without recovery. In this context, resilience is an emergent property of complex systems. In the present study, we argue that both definitions and uses are appropriate in ecotoxicology, and although the differences are subtle, the implications and uses are profoundly different. We discuss resilience concepts in ecotoxicology, where the prevailing view of resilience is engineering resilience from chemical stress. Ecological resilience may also be useful for describing systemic ecological changes because of chemical stress. We present quantitative methods that allow ecotoxicologists and risk managers to assess whether an ecosystem faces an impending regime shift or whether it has already undergone such a shift. We contend that engineering and ecological resilience help to distinguish ecotoxicological responses to chemical stressors mechanistically and thus have implications for theory, policy, and application. Environ Toxicol Chem 2017;36:2574-2580. © 2017 SETAC.

The exact amount of a product’s cost that is committed during the design phase is commonly debated, however based on the literature it is generally agreed that 70-85% of the costs are committed during the design phase. This information combined with the Department of Defense (DoD) focus on engineered resilient systems (ERS) has led to the research and development of a Manufacturability Assessment Knowledge based Evaluation (MAKE) methodology. This research is focused on the development of a manufacturability methodology to evaluate and assess alternative product designs in the early life cycle stages. McCall et al outlines the research efforts focused on the creation of the methodology and development and testing of a corresponding software tool. The research has continued forward with enhancements to the MAKE methodology and tool based on case study findings, which is the basis for this paper.The case study provided valuable insight into the research and development activities needed to improve the methodology to better fit with an early lifecycle development phase. Subsequently, a software tool redesign effort took place to improve the outputs available to the user and to streamline the methodology process. This paper will discuss the improvements for the design of the updated version of the MAKE tool and how it can be used for future assessments of DoD products for benefit to the warfighter.

The virtual test bed (VTB) is a prototype of a virtual engineering environment to study operations of current and future space vehicles, spaceports, and ranges. The high-level architecture (HLA) as defined by the Department of Defense (DoD), is the main environment. The VTB/HLA implementation described here represents different systems that interact in the simulation of a space shuttle liftoff. This example implementation displays the collaboration of a simplified version of the space shuttle simulation model and a simulation of the launch scrub evaluation model. Spaceports and ranges are complex systems. This VTB framework is a collaborative computing environment that integrates in a seamless fashion simulation models that represent the different stages in the lifecycle of a complex system. A complex system is a non-linear system of systems whose interactions bring together interesting emergent properties that are very difficult to visualize and/or study by using the traditional approach of decomposition.

The virtual test bed (VTB) is a prototype of a virtual engineering environment to study operations of current and future space vehicles, spaceports, and ranges. The high-level architecture (HLA) as defined by the Department of Defense (DoD), is the main environment. The VTB/HLA implementation described here represents different systems that interact in the simulation of a space shuttle liftoff. This example implementation displays the collaboration of a simplified version of the space shuttle simulation model and a simulation of the launch scrub evaluation model. Spaceports and ranges are complex systems. This VTB framework is a collaborative computing environment that integrates in a seamless fashion simulation models that represent the different stages in the lifecycle of a complex system. A complex system is a non-linear system of systems whose interactions bring together interesting emergent properties that are very difficult to visualize and/or study by using the traditional approach of decomposition.

In recent years, there has been a large push in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to more rapidly respond and adapt to changing technology advancements and emerging communications systems threats. One issue has been that traditional DoD waveform development has been stove-piped in that processing blocks are implemented to serve a single function instead of made generic and configurable to support multiple waveforms. Developing new waveforms typically requires starting from scratch almost everytime. In this paper, we present Common Hardware-modem Integrated Library (CHIL). CHIL is both a library of configurable processing blocks as well as a framework that ties these blocks together to rapidly instantiate new DoD and non-DoD waveforms. We present an overview of the CHIL framework and various components as well as provide a test-case where CHIL was leveraged to instantiate a DoD waveform.

Space Superiority, which envelopes Space Situational Awareness (SSA) and Defensive/Offense Counterspace (DCS/OCS), is a national security imperative. Selecting system concepts that optimize coverage areas while ensuring high quality, actionable data products can be a daunting task in the best fiscal environments. With the present budgetary constraints, it is even more important to optimize system concepts that provide critical operational capabilities against their respective life-cycle costs. This requires significant innovation, not only to perform SSA, DCS and OCS missions from a technical standpoint, but also from an economic standpoint. It is well established that the majority of a system’s life cycle cost is set prior to the first project milestone. Much of this occurs during the Concept Definition and Analysis of Alternative (AoA) sub-phases, as well as the Concept Selection milestone. Simulation based analysis offers great potential for advantage in Concept Definition and evaluation of concepts for AoA and Concept Selection. Sufficiently developed simulation capabilities could be used to assess the operational utility of a new concept, identify critical performance metrics for a given mission, compare competing concepts against performance metrics, quantify technical risks of the system even beyond the development phase, and identify significant contributors to life cycle cost by potentially simulating the entire life cycle of the system concept. Substantial system simulation technology exists but is only focused on pieces of the overall problem of simulating the entire life cycle. By bringing these pieces together into a consolidated life-cycle simulation based assessment, system concepts could be designed not only for performance, but also to minimize life-cycle cost. Furthermore, they can be evaluated with respect to system peculiarities that contribute to cost throughout the life of the system.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with increased risk for suicide, and clinicians often encounter acute suicide risk during the process of intervening upon PTSD. Although the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Department of Defense (DoD) have disseminated evidence-based treatments for PTSD, prior clinical trials have used inconsistent definitions and unclear assessment methods of suicide risk. Consequently, translating findings from PTSD treatment research to clinical practice remains challenging. This article describes challenges inherent to the current PTSD interventional research literature related to concurrent acute suicide risk among veterans and active duty service members. We reviewed prior trials and how their assessment methods and nomenclature compare with strategies and definitions mandated within the VA/DoD. Furthermore, we describe methodological recommendations for future research, including consistent use of mandated universal suicide nomenclature, standardization for classifying suicide risk, transparency in reporting assessment means and measures, and examination of current models of PTSD treatment in the context of acute suicide risk.

The formal Systems Engineering process was developed by the Department of Defense and its contractors in the late 1950s, during the development of the first ballistic missile systems, and was first documented as a standard process in 1969 in MIL-STD 499, Engineering Management. The process is intended to provide an overall framework for managing the development and acquisition of complex defense systems, describing an orderly sequence and supporting documentation to be implemented by both the government customers and development contractors. During the definition of systems engineering, defense and aerospace systems clearly represented the most complex products undertaken by the U.S. scientific, engineering, and industrial communities. As commercial products, particularly those spanning many technical disciplines, began to exhibit the same degree of complexity, the companies responsible for these commercial products have started adapting the DoD systems engineering process and practices for use in commercial product development projects.

The Intelligent Fuzzy Controllers Laboratory has been developed in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Western Michigan University with the help of a DURIP grant by the Department of Defense [6] and generous donations by ABB Automation Technology Products. This new lab is to support research, the development of advanced courses, and graduate projects in the area of intelligent controls for large, complex hybrid systems. One of the targeted applications is the supervisory level of flatness control for cold rolling mills. Contemporary industrial control systems are designed using Object Oriented methods and software agents. It is required that the system should reach its goals even when unexpected events occur in an uncertain environment. The current research focus is on fault detection and automated recovery from faults. A fuzzy automaton has been proposed to model the system at critical junctions of the control algorithm. A research project is currently underway to develop a Generic Encapsulated Fuzzy Automaton Software Agent for Object Oriented Control Systems. The aim of the project is twofold: 1) to develop and evaluate the performance of new methods and architectures for this area of research, and 2) to create a laboratory environment in which masters and doctoral students can work on independent projects as well as course assignments. In the first part of the paper, we will summarize the key research ideas behind the lab. The second part of the paper will focus on creating a software environment for conducting research and supporting graduate courses in the intelligent supervisory controls area. Students will be developing solutions for plant control problems using skeleton codes provided and will be verifying the performance of their solutions with the help of the Fuzzy Automaton Software Agent and a plant simulator program. Both the Fuzzy Automaton Software Agent and the plant simulator are written in Java. These two programs are added to ABB's industrial software control system. The overall system will

Quantum physics is a linear theory, so it is somewhat puzzling that it can underlie very complex systems such as digital computers and life. This paper investigates how this is possible. Physically, such complex systems are necessarily modular hierarchical structures, with a number of key features. Firstly, they cannot be described by a single wave function: only local wave functions can exist, rather than a single wave function for a living cell, a cat, or a brain. Secondly, the quantum to classical transition is characterised by contextual wave-function collapse shaped by macroscopic elements that can be described classically. Thirdly, downward causation occurs in the physical hierarchy in two key ways: by the downward influence of time dependent constraints, and by creation, modification, or deletion of lower level elements. Fourthly, there are also logical modular hierarchical structures supported by the physical ones, such as algorithms and computer programs, They are able to support arbitrary logical operations, which can influence physical outcomes as in computer aided design and 3-d printing. Finally, complex systems are necessarily open systems, with heat baths playing a key role in their dynamics and providing local arrows of time that agree with the cosmological direction of time that is established by the evolution of the universe.

In the current literature, data is aggregated for the estimation of functions to explain or predict crash patterns using either clustering analysis, regression analysis, or stage-wise models. Typically, analysis sites are grouped into site subtypes based on predefined characteristics. The assumption is that sites within each subtype experience similar crash patterns as a function of prespecified explanatory characteristics. To develop functions to estimate crashes, all data points are clustered only as a function of associated site characteristics. As a consequence, estimated parameters may be based on different crash patterns that represents various trends that could be better captured by using multiple functions. To address this limitation, this study proposes a mathematical program utilizing clusterwise regression to assign sites to clusters and simultaneously seek sets of parameter values for the corresponding estimation functions, so as to maximize the probability of observing the available data. A simulated annealing, coupled with maximum likelihood estimation, was used to solve the mathematical program. Results were analyzed for two site subtypes with fatal and all injury crashes: (1) roadway segments for urban multilane divided segments and (2) urban four-leg signalized intersections. Clusterwise regression improved the predicted number of crashes with multiple estimation functions within the same site subtype.

ABSTRACTDepartment of Defense (DoD) program managers are increasingly challenged with the difficulties of balancing the risks associated with cost, schedule, and performance in an era of intense competition for increasingly scarce resources. Requirements associated with environmental, safety, and health (ESH), in the context of thirty to forty‐year service lives, have not been consistently, or in some cases adequately, addressed in DoD programs. Environmental protection (EP) requirements generally do not fit the normal requirements generation and product synthesis model typically applied to weapon system development. As with all requirements, early identification is the key to integration into the total system. Recognition that EP requirements must be integrated at program conception led to development of the ESH Integration Model by the U.S. Navy Lewis and Clark (T‐AKE) Auxiliary Cargo Ammunition Ship Program. Institutionalization of this model has enabled the T‐AKE Program to establish EP performance requirements for the twelve‐ship class that substantially reduce the environmental footprint of the Navy. Compared to the fifteen ships that it will be replacing, T‐AKE will require fifty percent less manning and reduce waste streams by seventy percent enabling an annual life cycle cost savings of $5M in ashore waste disposal costs. The T‐AKE Program has been the first to achieve the Chief of Naval Operations vision for the “Environmentally Sound Warship of the 21st Century” through design integration of EP requirements.