Chapter 5

A Typology of Resilience Situations

Ron Westrum

‘Resilience’ involves many different matters covered by the same word. None the less I believe we can see some commonalities in the threats that resilience protects against and the modes in which it operates. The aim of this paper will be to sort out these threats and modes, which I believe provide different implications for developing resilient systems.

Resilience against What?

The first question to examine is the nature of the threats to the integrity of the system that require it to be resilient. There are basically three aspects to threats:

•  The predictability of the threat. Predictability does not mean that we can predict when the event will take place, but only that it takes place ...

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