Resilience of Complex Systems: State of the Art and Directions for Future Research

TLDR

This review surveys the resilience of complex systems across diverse research areas, identifies key intellectual communities and scholars, and synthesizes core knowledge while comparing how the concept has evolved from ecology and assessing cross‑fertilization among domains. The authors employ bibliometric tools to map the state of the art, analyze the evolution of resilience research from ecological origins, and compare approaches across fields to evaluate cross‑fertilization. The analysis reveals resilience as a multidisciplinary concept central to environmental science, ecology, and engineering, with growing interest in operations research, management science, business, and computer science, yet research remains fragmented and cross‑disciplinary integration scarce, prompting the authors to suggest future research directions.

Abstract

This paper reviews the state of the art on the resilience of complex systems by embracing different research areas and using bibliometric tools. The aim is to identify the main intellectual communities and leading scholars and to synthesize key knowledge of each research area. We also carry out a comparison across the research areas, aimed at analyzing how resilience is approached in any field, how the topic evolved starting from the ecological field of study, and the level of cross‐fertilization among domains. Our analysis shows that resilience of complex systems is a multidisciplinary concept, which is particularly important in the fields of environmental science, ecology, and engineering. Areas of recent and increasing interest are also operation research, management science, business, and computer science. Except for environmental science and ecology, research is fragmented and carried out by isolated research groups. Integration is not only limited inside each field but also between research areas. In particular, we trace the citation links between different research areas and find a very limited number, revealing a scarce cross‐fertilization among domains. We conclude by providing some directions for future research.