Defining Survivability for Engineering Systems

Abstract This paper introduces an on-going doctoral research track on the role of survivability as an attribute in the design of complex system architectures. Survivability may be defined generally as the ability of a system to mini-mize the impact of a finite disturbance on value delivery, achieved through either the satisfaction of a minimally acceptable level of value delivery during and after a finite distur-bance or the reduction of the likelihood or magnitude of a disturbance. While survivable design of physical system components is a well-understood practice that is best left to established domains, architecting for surviv-ability is a poorly-understood, socio-technical challenge increasingly relevant to engineering systems. After describing the motivation for and the scope of the research, survivability is concep-tualized as a meta-framework for robustness and changeability. Survivability includes both passive and active techniques which may manifest themselves in the physical, opera-tional, and organizational design of engineer-ing systems. Where passive survivability re-lies on the design principles of hardness, stealth, redundancy, and diversity to enable a system to resist a projected disturbance envi-ronment, active survivability embraces uncer-tainty in the projection of future disturbances by stressing architectural agility through the ability to regenerate, evolve, relocate, and re-taliate.

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