Resilience Engineering Principles for Digital Public Infrastructure Stability

Abstract

Digital public infrastructure (DPI) provides the operational backbone of national-scale systems spanning payments, identity authentication, healthcare delivery, taxation, and civic services. What distinguishes DPI from enterprise platforms is not simply scale; it is the presence of multiple, deeply entangled stakeholder layers and socio-technical interdependencies that conventional reliability engineering was never designed to handle. The mainstream fault-tolerance literature does not adequately address the particular challenge of correlated disruption regimes, where a failure in one component systematically stresses components elsewhere.

The present work develops a quantitative resilience engineering framework that treats DPI stability as bounded degradation under precisely these correlated systemic stress conditions. Four metrics form the analytical core: dependency-layer decoupling measures based on spectral radius analysis of service adjacency matrices; correlation exposure coefficients that capture aggregate pairwise disruption coupling; probabilistic degradation envelope models expressed as performance bounds; and adaptive governance damping coefficients that govern feedback stabilization in the policy control layer. A cascade stability condition emerges from this analysis: a DPI dependency network is cascade-stable if and only if λmax(A) < 1, where A is the service dependency adjacency matrix. Monte Carlo simulations done across disruption correlation regimes ρ ∈ [0, 0.8] and feedback amplification factors α ∈ [1.0, 1.5] show that resilience-enhanced architectures keep worst-case service degradation more than 40% below redundancy-based baselines, reduce peak degradation amplitude by 30–45% through governance damping alone, and shorten recovery time by 35%. The implication is that structural isolation, dependency decoupling, degradation bounding, and adaptive governance damping together provide stability margins that no redundancy-focused architecture can replicate under correlated failure regimes.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17762/ijisae.v14i1s.8239