Definitions of Disturbance, Resilience and Robustness in ATM Context

Abstract

Resilience is a fundamental property of the natural ecosystem that enables quick recovery after numerous disturbances occurring frequently. This vital ability of the ecosystem makes resilience a very desirable property of man-made socio-technical systems, one of which is an ATM System. In ecology and in other domains there are a lot of definitions and interpretations of the term resilience. Most of them fall into two big groups with semantical meanings ”resilience“ and ”robustness“. Currently in the ATM Context exists a definition of resilience from the safety science perspective only. Since we investigate resilience of an ATM System from the more general - performance point of view, which includes safety with performance aspects, it is necessary to develop conceptual definitions of resilience and robustness of an ATM System, which have a clear differentiation between these terms and enable their measurement. The aim of this report is to give a short description of the developed framework, which incorporates created concept of robustness, resilience and relevant terms: disturbance, stress and perturbation. The created framework is illustrated with one simple example and is accomplished with an according decision-making chain. The report also suggests some qualitative and quantitative measures of resilience and robustness and provides a structured approach for investigation of these properties of a system. In spite of the fact, that the concept is developed in the ATM Context, it is transferable and can be used for any socio-technical system.