3. Technical Principles

Many scholars and practitioners whose backgrounds are in the engineering and associated technical disciplines tend to focus on the utilisation stage and thus approach the management of engineered assets from the stance of risk, reliability, and cost. Given this stance, operators and maintainers commonly focus on safety risks as well as risk of malfunction or functional failure of a component, spare part, subassembly, subsystem or the whole asset. The era of Society 5.0 features increasing dependence on hyper-interconnected and interdependent cyber physical systems of engineered assets that are confronted by stressors attributable to VUCA phenomena like the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, or vis major events, that is, → superior powers or forces which can neither be resisted nor controlled. Therefore, the concepts of resilience and vulnerability have become significantly pertinent for managing interconnected systems of engineered assets, especially because CPSs are embedded within socio-economic systems (SES), and both CPS and SES are encapsulated within the environment and ecology. The discourse here highlights the concepts of reliability, risk, resilience, vulnerability, and condition from a pragmatic viewpoint. Readers interested in detailed treatise of these concepts may refer to other extant literature. Philosophically, these concepts are rooted in the quest of how to deal with uncertainty.