Years back, the discussion of resilience started with somewhat vague notions of building to better resist and recover from extreme events. As the concept has advanced, there have been attempts to provide more concrete definitions by multiple organizations, such as the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, the National Security Council, the Office of the Press Secretary, the Industry Statement on Resilience, and others. All of these definitions included wording that resilience involved reducing the magnitude and/or duration of the effects of an event on the building, infrastructure, community, etc. While this is a clear step forward in defining what resilience means in a general sense, none of the definitions provided ways to measure resilience and, maybe more importantly, to objectively determine if a design is more resilient than the alternatives.
The objective resilience committee of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Engineering Mechanics Institute has addressed this issue with a series of manuals of practice (MOPs) addressing various aspects of evaluating resilience in an objective manner. The intent is to provide a resource for engineers, architects, government officials, contractors, owners, etc., who want to incorporate resilience into their projects and are looking for ways to either evaluate its impact or best practices. Multiple authors worked on the various chapters, and the entire series was evaluated by a Blue Ribbon Panel. The MOP is split into four volumes, each of which looks at a different aspect of resilience.