Chapter 8

Engineering Resilience into Safety-Critical Systems

Nancy Leveson

Nicolas Dulac

David Zipkin

Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld

John Carroll

Betty Barrett

Resilience and Safety

Resilience is often defined in terms of the ability to continue operations or recover a stable state after a major mishap or event. This definition focuses on the reactive nature of resilience and the ability to recover after an upset. In this chapter, we use a more general definition that includes prevention of upsets. In our conception, resilience is the ability of systems to prevent or adapt to changing conditions in order to maintain (control over) a system property. In this chapter, the property we are concerned about is safety or risk. To ensure safety, the system ...

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