Resilience engineering for sociotechnical safety management

Abstract

Modern societies call for a reconsideration of risk and safety, in light of the increasing complexity of human-made systems. Technological artefacts, and the respective role of humans, as well as the organizational contexts in which they operate, dramatically changed in the last decades with an even more severe transformation expected in the future. Rooted in human factors, ergonomics, cognitive engineering, systems thinking and complexity theory, the discipline of resilience engineering proposes innovative approaches for safety challenges imposed by the dynamic, uncertain, and intertwined nature of modern sociotechnical systems. Resilience engineering aims to provide support means for ensuring that systems can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions. This chapter aims to provide a summary of the scientific field of resilience engineering, as well as a description of two methods common in the field, the resilience analysis grid and the functional resonance analysis method. Following two examples, the chapter proposes a multidisciplinary research agenda for the field.