  Having become vital to satisfying basic human needs, water distribution
systems (WDSs) are considered critical infrastructure. They are vulnerable to
critical events such as extreme weather, natural and man-made disasters, armed
conflicts etc. To account for critical events in the context of design and
operation of WDSs, the concept of resilience is frequently mentioned. How
resilience of WDSs can be assessed using resilience metrics has been the
subject of research of many publications. The aim of this paper is to inspect
the alignment between a general understanding of resilience in WDSs and the
metrics used for resilience assessment. A novel framework for categorising
resilience metrics for WDSs is presented. A literature review of resilience
metrics for WDSs is performed and the results are analysed using the framework
designed. The results show that resilience metrics do not really assess
resilience of the systems, but rather only specific functions and properties of
systems which can make them resilient.
