Designing systems and processes resilient to sudden shocks is an essential element
of system analysis in many engineering fields. Quantitative resilience assessment
employs various metrics to examine and monitor system resilience through experimentation.
Existing resilience metrics typically portray the system’s response to a shock-like
event as an inverse bell-shaped, triangular, or trapezoidal curve of performance over
time. Then, for example, the downward and upward slopes are interpreted as the disruption
and restoration phases of the system, respectively. However, these metrics fail or
need simplification when a system response does not exhibit such an idealized shape.
In this paper, we introduce a composite metric combining various elements of system
performance curves, irrespective of shape features. Additionally, the metric integrates
a user-defined critical threshold into its mathematical formulation. To verify the
metric’s performance, we conducted a survey among researchers in energy system analysis
using illustrative system response curves. Comparing the survey-derived ranking and
the metric values verifies that the metric aligns with the judgment and expectations
of potential users. Finally, we benchmark our metric against its contemporaries, highlighting
its versatility with nontypical performance curves. Due to its modular mathematical
formulation, this metric can be applied, enhanced, and extended for comparative performance
assessment in various fields of analysis, especially in the absence of idealized system
response curves.
