A System Engineering Approach to Disaster Resilience—An Introduction

In this dynamic earth, each and every place is affected from natural, technological, biological, environmental hazards and/or related impacts. Depending on the extent of resilience measures in place and socioeconomic status of the countries, their infrastructures and environmental sensitiveness, the damage, and loss patterns are exposed. So to ensure basic security and quality of life against all, impending hazards have been the key issues for the academia and industries vis-a-vis administrative setup. Therefore, disaster resilience has become a systemic challenge for the mankind, and eventually, responding to disasters has been into the mainframe of all concerned governance from the time that natural resources are being extracted and used for the exploiting more and more from the mother nature. But in recent times as we are making lots of infrastructural growth, it is more so critical with the onset of deadly infectious disease outbreaks, acts of terrorism, social unrest, and fluctuation in the share market leading to financial disasters. From perspective of system engineering approaches, this chapter explains various facets of disaster resilience paradigm with particular motivation to the infrastructure growth and sustenance. Additionally, a summary of the 38 selected papers categorized into six sub-themes about the necessary approaches to elevate resilience to disasters is presented.