THE CONCEPT OF RESILIENCE IN COMMUNITY AND ENGINEERED SYSTEMS - A CROSS SECTORAL FEEDING OF IDEAS

Abstract

This paper outlines some recent work in organising the metaphor of "resilience" in application to engineered systems. This work provides an approach to the identification of threat types and magnitudes and the acceptable or desired outcomes to instances of the threats which can be used for specification of engineered system. The paper then explores the usage of the word family "resilience" in The Australian Journal of Emergency Management, a sector journal published by the Australian government. It is found that "resilience" is used as a metaphor, which is often described, in various ways, but not tightly defined. It is concluded that the emergency management sector would benefit from exploring the broadening and application of the engineering concepts to the less crisp issues related to the impact of threats on distributed community systems, so that appropriate disaster resilience development responses are made.