Abstract:
The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global
Risks Report 2013 arrived at a working definition for national
resilience that involved three characteristics, namely
robustness, redundancy and resourcefulness. We have drawn
mappings between the WEF’s robustness, resilience and
resourcefulness and the structural engineering characteristics of
robustness, redundancy and ductility. We use this first to
propose a multi-sectoral framework involving the
infrastructural, environmental, sociological, economic, and
geopolitical sectors, also proposed by the WEF, but divide them
into the three hierarchical levels of country, city and building.
These three levels, three characteristics and five sectors give rise
to a matrix of 45 aspects, with resilience features suggested for
some of them. In this way we move towards proposing a multisectoral,
multi-hierarchical resilience audit for a nation. We
then use force-displacement analogies from structural
mechanics to quantify resilience through an analogy to energy
absorption, depending on the various levels of robustness,
redundancy and ductility, thus generating an 8-point scale for a
resilience index. The analogy suggests that ductility is the most
important characteristic, but that it can be traded-off with
redundancy. Redundancy is more important than robustness,
but both are much more important for systems that lack
ductility compared to those that possess it.
Citation:
P. Dias and S. Viswakula, "Structural Mechanics Analogies for a Resilience Audit and Index," 2020 Moratuwa Engineering Research Conference (MERCon), 2020, pp. 66-71, doi: 10.1109/MERCon50084.2020.9185398.