Introduction to a novel structural resilience index: Definition, description and examples

Resilience is the ability to undergo disruptive events without suffering complete failure and minimizing their undesirable consequences. Clearly, it would be ideal to have at hand a synthetic measure of the resilience of mechanical structures, which would allow assigning a rank to different structures. In this talk I will report a primitive attempt performed by Chiaia et al. at defining a novel deterministic structural resilience index, based on a worst-case disruptive event, and making use of a minimalistic kinematics-based mechanical description. The presentation will be enriched with several examples that will give an insight on this novel resilience index. Its possible complexifications based on specific applications, will be outlined.