Resilience engineering

Resilience engineering is a subfield of safety science research that focuses on understanding how complex adaptive systems cope when encountering a surprise. The term resilience in this context refers to the capabilities that a system must possess in order to deal effectively with unanticipated events. Resilience engineering examines how systems build, sustain, degrade, and lose these capabilities.[1]

Resilience engineering researchers have studied multiple safety-critical domains, including aviation, anesthesia, fire safety, space mission control, military operations, power plants, air traffic control, rail engineering, health care, and emergency response to both natural and industrial disasters.[1][2][3] Resilience engineering researchers have also studied the non-safety-critical domain of software operations.[4]

Whereas other approaches to safety (e.g., behavior-based safety, probabilistic risk assessment) focus on designing controls to prevent or mitigate specific known hazards (e.g., hazard analysis), or on assuring that a particular system is safe (e.g., safety cases), resilience engineering looks at a more general capability of systems to deal with hazards that were not previously known before they were encountered.

In particular, resilience engineering researchers study how people are able to cope effectively with complexity to ensure safe system operation, especially when they are experiencing time pressure.[5] Under the resilience engineering paradigm, accidents are not attributable to human error. Instead, the assumption is that humans working in a system are always faced with goal conflicts, and limited resources, requiring them to constantly make trade-offs while under time pressure. When failures happen, they are understood as being due to the system temporarily being unable to cope with complexity.[6] Hence, resilience engineering is related to other perspectives in safety that have reassessed the nature of human error, such as the "new look",[7] the "new view",[8] "safety differently",[9] and Safety-II.[10]

Resilience engineering researchers ask questions such as:

  • What can organizations do in order to be better prepared to handle unforeseeable challenges?
  • How do organizations adapt their structure and behavior to cope effectively when faced with an unforeseen challenge?

Because incidents often involve unforeseen challenges, resilience engineering researchers often use incident analysis as a research method.[3][2]

  1. ^ a b Woods, D.D. (2018). "Resilience is a Verb" (PDF). In Trump, B.D.; Florin, M.-V.; Linkov, I (eds.). IRGC resource guide on resilience (vol. 2): Domains of resilience for complex interconnected systems. Lausanne, CH: EPFL International Risk Governance Center.
  2. ^ a b Pariès, Jean. Resilience Engineering in Practice. ISBN 978-1-317-06525-8. OCLC 1151009227.
  3. ^ a b Hollnagel, Erik; Christopher P. Nemeth; Sidney Dekker, eds. (2019). Resilience engineering perspectives. Vol. 2: Preparation and Restoration. CRC Press. ISBN 978-0-367-38540-8. OCLC 1105725342.
  4. ^ Woods, D.D. (2017). STELLA: Report from the SNAFUcatchers Workshop on Coping With Complexity. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University.
  5. ^ Dekker, Sidney (2019). Foundations of safety science: a century of understanding accidents and disasters. Boca Raton. ISBN 978-1-351-05977-0. OCLC 1091899791.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  6. ^ (David), Woods, D. (2017). Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts. CRC Press. ISBN 978-1-317-06528-9. OCLC 1011232533.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  7. ^ Woods, David D.; Sidney Dekker; Richard Cook; Leila Johannesen (2017). Behind human error (2nd ed.). Boca Raton. ISBN 978-1-317-17553-7. OCLC 1004974951.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  8. ^ Dekker, Sidney W. A. (2002-10-01). "Reconstructing human contributions to accidents: the new view on error and performance". Journal of Safety Research. 33 (3): 371–385. doi:10.1016/S0022-4375(02)00032-4. ISSN 0022-4375. PMID 12404999. S2CID 46350729.
  9. ^ Dekker, Sidney (2015). Safety differently : human factors for a new era (Second ed.). Boca Raton, FL. ISBN 978-1-4822-4200-3. OCLC 881430177.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  10. ^ Hollnagel, Erik (2014). Safety-I and safety-II: the past and future of safety management. Farnham. ISBN 978-1-4724-2306-1. OCLC 875819877.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)