Survivability

Survivability is the ability to remain alive or continue to exist. The term has more specific meaning in certain contexts. Risks to civilization, humans, and planet EarthResilience (ecology)Island ecology and United Nations University Following disruptive forces such as flood, fire, disease, war, or climate change some species of flora, fauna, and local life forms are likely to survive more successfully than others because of consequent changes to their surrounding biophysical conditions. In engineering, survivability is the quantified ability of a system, subsystem, equipment, process, or procedure to continue to function during and after a natural or man-made disturbance; for example a nuclear electromagnetic pulse from the detonation of a nuclear weapon. For a given application, survivability must be qualified by specifying the range of conditions over which the entity will survive, the minimum acceptable level or post-disturbance functionality, and the maximum acceptable downtime. In the military environment, survivability can be defined as the ability to remain mission capable after a single engagement. Engineers working in survivability are often responsible for improving four main system elements: Detectability - the inability to avoid being aurally and visually detected as well as detected by radar (by an observer). Susceptibility - the inability to avoid being hit (by a weapon). Vulnerability - the inability to withstand the hit. Recoverability - longer-term post-hit effects, damage control, and firefighting, capability restoration, or (in extremis) escape and evacuation. The European Survivability Workshop introduced the concept of "Mission Survivability" whilst retaining the three core areas above, either pertaining to the "survivability" of a platform through a complete mission, or the "survivability" of the mission itself (i.e. probability of mission success). Recent studies have also introduced the concept of "Force Survivability" which relates to the ability of a force rather than an individual platform to remain "mission capable".