Masters Theses

Ashik Chandra

Abstract

"Resilient systems have the ability to endure and successfully recover from disturbances by identifying problems and mobilizing the available resources to cope with the disturbance. Resiliency lets a system recover from disruptions, variations, and a degradation of expected working conditions. Biological systems are resilient. Immune systems are highly adaptive and scalable, with the ability to cope with multiple data sources, fuse information together, makes decisions, have multiple interacting agents, operate in a distributed manner over a multiple scales, and have a memory structure to facilitate learning. Ecosystems are resilient since they have the capacity to absorb disturbance and are able to tolerate the disturbances. Ants build colonies that are dispersed, modular, fine grained, and standardized in design, yet they manage to forage intelligently for food and also organize collective defenses by the property of resilience.

Are there any rules that we can identify to explain the resilience in these systems? The answer is yes. In insect colonies, rules determine the division of labor and how individual insects act towards each other and respond to different environmental possibilities. It is possible to group these rules based on attributes. These attributes are distributability, redundancy, adaptability, flexibility, interoperability, and diversity. It is also possible to incorporate these rules into engineering systems in their design to make them resilient. It is also possible to develop a qualitative model to generate resilience heuristics for engineering system based on a given attribute. The rules seen in nature and those of an engineering system are integrated to incorporate the desired characteristics for system resilience. The qualitative model for systems resilience will be able to generate system resilience heuristics. This model is simple and it can be applied to any system by using attribute based heuristics that are domain dependent. It also provides basic foundation for building computational models for designing resilient system architectures. This model was tested on recent catastrophes like the Mumbai terror attack and hurricane Katrina. With the disturbances surrounding the current world this resilience model based on heuristics will help a system to deal with crisis and still function in the best way possible by depending mainly on internal variables within the system"--Abstract, page iii.

Advisor(s)

Dagli, Cihan H., 1949-

Committee Member(s)

Guardiola, Ivan
Corns, Steven

Department(s)

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering

Degree Name

M.S. in Systems Engineering

Publisher

Missouri University of Science and Technology

Publication Date

Summer 2010

Pagination

viii, 134 pages

Note about bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 34-40).

Rights

© 2010 Ashik Chandra, All rights reserved.

Document Type

Thesis - Open Access

File Type

text

Language

English

Subject Headings

Computer architectureEngineering systemsHeuristic programmingReliability (Engineering) -- Mathematical models

Thesis Number

T 9662

Print OCLC #

688635670

Electronic OCLC #

657761523

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