Future of Resilience Assessment: The AMBER Research Roadmap

Abstract

This chapter provides a condensed description of a roadmap for research in technologies for assessment, measurement and benchmarking (AMB) of the resilience of information, computer and communication systems. The research roadmap is the result of the EU-funded AMBER Coordination Action, integrating the consortium experience in the field with the insights resulting from discussions and interviews with a variety of stakeholders about motivating scenarios, drivers and priorities. A set of motivating scenarios help understand the current needs and challenges in resilience assessment. These scenarios present viewpoints of industrial players, end users, system operators and regulators. The research roadmap then provides a detailed list of research needs and challenges grouped in three categories: (i) scientific and technological foundations, (ii) measurement and assessment, and (iii) benchmarking. The foundations make the case for two types of research advances, which we could label as ‘back to basics’ and ‘holistic’. The measurement and assessment category identifies a number of topics of acute interest and that are particularly challenging. Resilience benchmarking aims at providing generic, repeatable and widely accepted methods for characterising and quantifying the system (or component) behaviour in the presence of faults, and comparing the resilience of alternative solutions. In addition to the above research issues, we also identified the challenges we see in education as well as standardization.