  Many systems on our planet are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from
one state to another when they are forced across a "tipping point," such as
mass extinctions in ecological networks, cascading failures in infrastructure
systems, and social convention changes in human and animal networks. Such a
regime shift demonstrates a system's resilience that characterizes the ability
of a system to adjust its activity to retain its basic functionality in the
face of internal disturbances or external environmental changes. In the past 50
years, attention was almost exclusively given to low dimensional systems and
calibration of their resilience functions and indicators of early warning
signals without considerations for the interactions between the components.
Only in recent years, taking advantages of the network theory and lavish real
data sets, network scientists have directed their interest to the real-world
complex networked multidimensional systems and their resilience function and
early warning indicators. This report is devoted to a comprehensive review of
resilience function and regime shift of complex systems in different domains,
such as ecology, biology, social systems and infrastructure. We cover the
related research about empirical observations, experimental studies,
mathematical modeling, and theoretical analysis. We also discuss some ambiguous
definitions, such as robustness, resilience, and stability.
