Resist and recover: Introducing a spring theory for modeling disaster resilience

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach for quantitatively modeling the resilience of a system that has been disrupted by a sudden-impact event. It introduces a new theoretical model that explicitly incorporates representations of the enabling and inhibiting forces that are inherent within postdisruption recovery behavior. Based on a new, more comprehensive measure of resilience that is able to capture both negative and positive deviations in performance, a generic mass–spring system is then used to illustrate the applicability of the theoretical model. The interplay between the enabling and inhibiting forces that is revealed by the new model provides a new theoretical basis for understanding the complexity of resilience and disaster recovery. With the addition of the new resilience measure, it lends support for defining and characterizing a new type of resilient behavior: unstable resilience.