Going beyond reliability to robustness and resilience in space systems

The words reliability, robustness, and resilience, are often used interchangeably to describe tough and dependable systems but the distinctions between them suggest how to design more serviceable space systems. Reliability is simply the quality of consistently performing well. A system that dependably meets its design requirements in the specified environments is reliable. The designers may not consider themselves responsible for failures under unanticipated conditions. Robustness is the capability of performing without failure under a wide range of conditions, which can go beyond the expected range to include possible off-nominal conditions. Resilience is the ability to recover from or adapt to damaging events, such as failures, accidents, external disruptions, and repurposing. Such changes are usually unanticipated. They often invalidate the usual operating assumptions and cause system failure.
Reliability, robustness, and resilience describe dependable performance under increasingly difficult conditions, first the specified environment, then a wider possible environment, and finally unanticipated damaging events. These three are increasingly desirable and increasingly difficult to achieve.
Engineering for resilience would design systems that can ignore or repair failures, survive accidents, and recover from disruptions. Increasing the resilience of space systems, the ability to perform after unanticipated events, would greatly increase space crew safety. Improving reliability and robustness can be done by dealing with known sources of problems, but improving resilience requires implementing a general approach to reducing the impact of unknown future events. Two contrasting approaches are reducing system complexity and adding supervisory control.
The need for resilience has been claimed for decades but little has been accomplished. Systems designers assume that they understand requirements, technologies, designs, architectures, integration, testing, operations, and environments. The potential problems of changes, failures, accidents, unknown environments, and unknown unknowns are ignored. Systems designers are typically overconfident and ignore the need for robustness and resilience.