Resilience Engineering Concepts and Precepts

For Resilience Engineering, 'failure' is the result of the adaptations necessary to cope with the complexity of the real world, rather than a breakdown or malfunction. The performance of individuals and organizations must continually adjust to current conditions and, because resources and time are finite, such adjustments are always approximate. This definitive new book explores this groundbreaking new development in safety and risk management, where 'success' is based on the ability of organizations, groups and individuals to anticipate the changing shape of risk before failures and harm occur. Featuring contributions from many of the worlds leading figures in the fields of human factors and safety, Resilience Engineering provides thought-provoking insights into system safety as an aggregate of its various components, subsystems, software, organizations, human behaviours, and the way in which they interact. The book provides an introduction to Resilience Engineering of systems, covering both the theoretical and practical aspects. It is written for those responsible for system safety on managerial or operational levels alike, including safety managers and engineers (line and maintenance), security experts, risk and safety consultants, human factors professionals and accident investigators.

Contents: Preface; Prologue: resilience engineering concepts, David D. Woods and Erik Hollnagel. Emergence: Resilience: the challenge of the unstable, Erik Hollnagel; Systems are ever-changing, Yushi Fujita; Essential characteristics of resilience, David D. Woods; Defining resilience, Andrew Hale and Tom Heijer; Nature of changes in systems, Yushi Fujita; Complexity, emergence, resilience, Jean Pariès; A typology of resilience situations, Ron Westrum; Resilient systems, Yushi Fujita; Incidents - markers of resilience or brittleness?, David D. Woods and Richard I. Cook; Resilience engineering: chronicling the emergence of confused consensus, Sidney Dekker. Cases and Processes: Engineering resilience into safety-critical systems, Nancy Leveson, Nicolas Dulac, David Zipkin, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, John Carroll and Betty Barrett; Is resilience really necessary? the case of railways, Andrew Hale and Tom Heijer; Systems are never perfect, Yushi Fujita; Structure for management of weak and diffuse signals, Lars Axelsson; Organisational resilience and industrial risk, Nick McDonald; An evil chain mechanism leading to failures, Yushi Fujita; Safety management in airlines, Arthur Dijkstra; Taking things in one's stride: cognitive features of two resilient performances, Richard I. Cook and Christopher Nemeth; Erosion of managerial resilience: from Vasa to NASA, Rhona Flin; Learning how to create resilience in business systems, Gunilla Sundström and Erik Hollnagel; Optimum system safety and optimum system resilience: agonistic or antagonistic concepts?, René Amalberti. Challenges for a Practice of Resilience Engineering: Properties of resilient organisations: an initial view, John Wreathall; Remedies, Yushi Fujita; Auditing resilience in risk control and safety management systems, Andrew Hale, Frank Guldenmund and Louis Goossens; How to design a safety organization: test case for resilience engineering, David D. Woods; Rules and procedures, Yushi Fujita; Distancing throu

Erik Hollnagel became Industrial Safety Chair at MINES ParisTech, France, in 2006, after having been Professor of Human-Machine Interaction at Linköping University, Sweden, since 1999. He is an internationally recognised specialist in the fields of industrial safety, human reliability analysis, cognitive systems engineering, and complex human-machine systems and author of more than 350 publications including 12 books. David D. Woods is Professor at the Institute for Ergonomics, Ohio State University, USA, and Past-President of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. He currently serves on a National Academy of Engineering/Institute of Medicine Study Panel to improve healthcare systems and on a National Research Council panel on research to define the future of the national air transportation system. Nancy Leveson is Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. She works in the areas of system safety, human-computer interaction and software engineering, in a variety of industries including nuclear power, space systems, aviation, medical devices and transportation.