Negentropy as a Measure to Evaluate the Resilience in Industrial Plants

Resilience is an essential quality of systems. This characteristic is based on the ability of a system to cope with disruptive events. To prevent decreases in system functionality and performance and to respond promptly to unexpected situations or shocks, systems must possess this capacity. One challenge lies in identifying and measuring resilience. Recently, various metrics have been proposed in the literature to represent the resilience of systems. Despite this, there is still no global resilience measure that can be used in any type of industrial system. This work investigated a series of moment statistics and explored the field of entropy in the search for a general resilience indicator. A set of 27 hypothetical cases were proposed to calculate the indices under evaluation. Then, a series of comparisons were made between these indices and two resilience indicators found in the literature. The main results of this work lead to the overall conclusion that it is possible to use some of these indicators as potential resilience indicators for engineering systems and production lines. Specifically, negentropy appears to be a good option for this purpose.