A rheological model analog for assessing the resilience of socio-technical systems across sectors

A rheological model is proposed that captures the performance loss and properties of a potential subsequent recovery of socio-technical systems subject to arbitrary disruptions. The model facilitates the quantitative assessment of such systems’ resilience. While most models known from the literature describe systems that fully recover from aforementioned load events, the proposed model can capture also permanent performance loss or post disruption improvement. To demonstrate the versatility of the approach for a wide range of the socio-technical system spectrum, the model is applied to three systems: the frequency stability of the continental Europe power grid, flight operations of German airports, and the revenue of the German gastronomic sector. Fitting the proposed two-spring, one-damper, single-degree-of-freedom model to the recorded performance data determines relevant parameters which serve as a quantitative measure of the respective system’s resilience. The small set of model parameters can be associated with relevant resilience dimensions. Variation of these parameters allows to quantitively determine the change of the model’s response to the load events, and thus of the resilience predicted by the model. This allows to identify parameter ranges in which the model predicts, e.g., full recovery of a system, instead of permanent performance loss.