Resilience of industrial plants is addressed in the case of cylindrical metal tanks. They are considered as demonstrators in order to write explicitly and analytically their bearing capacity drops, their recovery functions by plastic adaptation and their resilience. For illustrative purposes, their behavior and the damages are investigated in the case of lateral loading that corresponds to tsunamis, floods or blasts effects. These key parameters are addressed in order to study the effects of internal interaction between the components of the system, i.e. along the critical cross-sections, and also the interaction at the frontiers, i.e. the influence of the limit conditions. For the case studies, the sub-domain for resilience is then studied and represented in the operation space "Hazard - Damage - Resilience". It is shown that the internal interaction and outer interactions have great influence on the resilience and capacity for recovery. Furthermore, conventional basins of attraction and attractors concepts are also adopted in order to provide illustrative representation of the capacity to return or not to resilient state for given values of the damages, for each of the limit conditions, i.e. depending on the inner/outer interactions. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.