Symbolic Context Model for Resilience Engineering

Resilience can be defined as the ability of a system to adapt to changing contexts. To develop a better understanding of the concept of resilience and describe system resilience, it is more important to focus on a context’s characteristics than to discuss the definition of resilience itself. This study proposes a model to comprehend and describe a context’s characteristics, consisting of six a priori concepts: space, time, entity, event, state, and modality. Based on the model, this study also presents a way to formalize context. To demonstrate the model’s utility and partial validity, this paper provides examples of the reinterpretation and formalization of existing key concepts relating to human factors and resilience engineering based on the proposed model.