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arXiv · 2609.23188

A General Multicriteria Optimization Perspective on Resilience

Stephan Helfrich·Gabriela Ciolacu·Jan Boeckmann·Emilia Grass
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Abstract

Resilience is a system's capability to prepare for, resist, absorb, and recover from adverse events. By definition, resilience therefore encompasses multiple criteria that can conflict and may prescribe different decisions. Importantly, a system must also maintain its effectiveness during routine operations and appropriately scale its preparedness for adverse events. Although resilience is inherently multicriteria, existing models often focus on a single criterion and do not explicitly analyze potential conflicts, the associated trade-offs, and their implications for decision-making. We formulate rebound, resistance, loss, and maximum performance degradation as separate resilience criteria in a general two-stage multicriteria model of network flows over time that integrates preparedness, effectiveness, and response. We show that, in general, such multicriteria optimization models are intractable and develop an enclosure-based heuristic for approximating the nondominated set. Our computational results show that different preparedness instruments and activation timings are associated with different resilience criteria and that the corresponding trade-offs are strongly instance-specific. Thus, resilience should be approached from an explicit multicriteria perspective rather than through a universal, preference-independent scalar index.

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Stephan Helfrich, Gabriela Ciolacu, Jan Boeckmann, Emilia Grass. 2026-09-19. A General Multicriteria Optimization Perspective on Resilience. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23188

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