A new structure of sociotechnical system processes using resilience engineering

Abstract

In the context of a world dominated by growing uncertainty, complex sociotechnical systems find themselves confronted with unexpected disruptions, which may lead to significant losses. To cope with these adverse events, modern sociotechnical systems constantly seek out ways of enlarging their ability to absorb and recover from disturbance, a capacity that we call resilience. With the aim of helping systems fulfill this mission, many research works have been conducted to develop methods for measuring, evaluating, and increasing the system’s resilience. One of the approaches, which arise from these works, is resilience engineering, a paradigm within which this article proposes a new structure of sociotechnical system processes, characterized by the introduction of resilience processes and their association with the other process categories. To illustrate the new proposed structure, we implemented a metamodel using the systems modeling language. Then, we focused on the resilience process behavior in a crisis through a qualitative and quantitative study accomplished by applying system dynamics approach. This article also develops a scoring system to assess the resilience of sociotechnical system processes and rank them based on the results.