A resilience engineering perspective of safety performance measurement systems: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Although safety performance measurement systems (SPMSs) are key elements of safety management, previous research is usually limited to the proposal or assessment of indicators, without adopting a systems perspective. Furthermore, what counts as a well-designed SPMS is contingent to the adopted theoretical perspective, which is normally implicit. In this study, Resilience Engineering (RE) has been used for assessing SPMSs, providing an explicit and systems-oriented perspective. Previous research on SPMSs was analysed in a systematic literature review, with the aim of identifying whether RE offers a new perspective on SPMSs, and understand how RE has been put into practice in SPMSs. For each paper, there was an evaluation of how it accounted for five RE guidelines concerned with the design and implementation of SPMSs. The uptake of the guidelines was low on average, indicating that RE does not largely overlap with traditional assumptions of SPMS literature. However, there were several studies moderately or strongly aligned with those guidelines, suggesting that RE has been implicitly adopted to some extent. Descriptors were devised to convey approaches for the operationalization of the guidelines, providing a reference for the design of SPMSs informed by RE. A research agenda is also proposed.