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.

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. Resilience engineering researchers have also studied the non-safety-critical domain of software operations.

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. 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. Hence, resilience engineering is related to other perspectives in safety that have reassessed the nature of human error, such as the "new look", the "new view", "safety differently", and Safety-II.

Resilience engineering researchers ask questions such as:

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

The first symposium on resilience engineering was held in October 2004 in Soderkoping, Sweden. It brought together fourteen safety science researchers with an interest in complex systems.

A second symposium on resilience engineering was held in November 2006 in Sophia Antipolis, France. The symposium had eighty participants. The Resilience Engineering Association, an association of researchers and practitioners with an interest in resilience engineering, continues to hold bi-annual symposia.