A Novel “Resilience Viewpoint” to aid in Engineering Resilience in Systems of Systems (SoS)

Abstract

Designing evolutionary systems to meet stakeholder expectations on safety, reliability and overall resilience is of great importance in an age of interconnectivity and high dependency systems. With incidents and disruptions becoming more frequent in recent years, the requirement for systems to demonstrate high levels of resilience given the economic, political and temporal dimensions of complexity, resilience is of great significance today. Systemic resilience is of high importance at the global level. Therefore, the role of the system engineer and architect is becoming more demanding due to the need to consider requirements from a broader range of stakeholders and to implement them into early conceptual designs. The early modeling process of all systems is common ground for most engineering projects, creating an architecture to both understand a system and to design future iterations by applying model‐based processes has become the norm. With the concept of systems‐of‐systems (SoS) becoming common language across multiple engineering domains, model‐based systems engineering techniques are evolving hand‐in‐hand to provide a paradigm to better analyse current and future SoS. The intrinsic characteristics of the constituent systems that make up the SoS make the challenge of designing and maintaining the reliability and resilience of a systems extremely difficult. This paper proposes a novel viewpoint, within an architecture framework (based around DoDAF, MoDAF and UPDM) to aid systems architects explore and design resilient SoS. This is known as the Resilience Viewpoint. Much of the research in the area is focussed on critical infrastructure (CI), looking at telecommunication networks, electric grid, supply networks etc, and little has been done on a generalizable tool for SoS architecture analysis, especially using existing modeling languages. Here, the application of the ‘Resilience Viewpoint’ is demonstrated using a case study from an integrated water supply system of systems, to portray its potential analytical capabilities.

Enhancing Enterprise Architecture with Resilience Perspective

“…Resilience is fast becoming an integral part of the system design effort and the desired system characteristic (Liu, Deters, and Zhang 2010). Although some researchers, such as Joannou and Kalawsky (2018) and Giachetti (2015) believe resilience is already a part of an EA solution and could be elicited from the existing EA models; the research literature agrees, however, that EA lacks resilience aspects and would benefit from the inclusion of a wholistic resilience representation in their frameworks. The existing EA philosophy does not provide sufficient weight to enterprise resilience.…”

“…This additional rigour is being undertaken as an investment because at an enterprise level, training often underpins innate resilience against many of the modern complexity dimensions like emerging technologies, cultural change, communication, safety systems, armour resilience and advanced persistent cyber-threats. We are keen to see further developments of similar [Resilience Architecture] pursuits such as of Joannou and Kalawsky (2018) RV-1 and RV-2 research that was in its initial stages during writing of this paperfurther comparison and academic discussion of the existing research on the subject is considered to be beneficial. Our research team also welcomes proposed collaboration on the resilience representations in DoDAF and on assessing training system resilience in particular.…”

“…Resilience as a viewpoint. Joannou and Kalawsky (2018) propose a novel resilience viewpoint to aid systems architects to explore and design resilient System of Systems (SoS). Their approach uses an architecture framework based around DoDAF, U.K. Ministry of Defence Architectural Frame-work (MODAF) and the 'Unified Profile for DoDAF and MODAF' (UPDM) (Hause 2010, April).…”

“…It is a technical viewpoint that describes interactions amongst constituent systems and provides details of interaction types and particulars about vulnerability and criticality aspects of constituent elements. Joannou and Kalawsky (2018) propose to consider resilience as early as the architectural SoS design phase, implying there must be some trade-off between increasing levels of resilience and cost of SoS implementation. Their resilience view is based on five levels of resilience, with level zero having no resilience present and five being "fully" resilient.…”

“…Although research literature offers a number of approaches to address resilience via EA frameworks, including the examples provided in this paper, these are commonly focussed on either resilience requirements specific to particular systems such as IT architecture (Liu, Deters, and Zhang 2010); or concentrate on aspects of a system, not a whole system's resilience (e.g. constituent elements' interactions, with modelling elements' vulnerability and criticality) (Joannou and Kalawsky (2018)). Erol, Henry, and Sauser (2010) highlight the importance of measuring capability systems' resilience in their operating environment to improve their resilience vis-à-vis the environment and to model and predict the short and long-term effects of change and operational management decisions on resilience.…”