Abstract

Engineering resilience is a measure of a system’s ability to maintain its functionality by resisting and recovering from adverse events. Although false alarms often occur in engineering practice, existing quantitative measures of engineering resilience do not consider false alarms. This makes it difficult to estimate the true degree of resilience and impedes efforts to design a resilient engineered system. This paper thus proposes a new resilience measure that considers false alarms. Two types of false alarms, Type I (false fault) and Type II (false health), are considered and quantified based upon conditional probability theory. A new resilience measure, which considers false alarm rates and reliability, is then formulated in a probabilistic manner. Compared to the conventional resilience measure, the newly formulated resilience measure can estimate system resilience more rigorously and accurately. The effectiveness of the proposed resilience measure is demonstrated via numerical and electro‐hydrostatic actuator case studies.