A Concept of Resilience in Production Systems

Abstract

The article presents the results of ongoing research on resilience in production systems. It refers to the term resilience as used in socio-ecological systems and applies it to assess the long-term functionality and effectiveness of industrial organizations in an uncertain world. It concentrates on refineries and chemical plants which, due to complex and sophisticated production processes and products themselves, are especially vulnerable to various kinds of disturbances. To illustrate the idea of resilience the machine reliability improvement programmes are examined using System Dynamics models to investigate situations when internal or external stress can lead to regime shift in production systems and make them move to an undesirable configuration e.g. from proactive to reactive maintenance mode. Resilience proved to be a useful concept for production managers interested in organizational transition to a more desired operational domain as well as remaining in the desired domain. System Dynamics methodology offers powerful tools for examining the impacts of various policy options on the dynamics of resilience in production systems.