Abstract
Resilience is commonly understood as the capacity for a system to maintain a desirable state while undergoing adversity or to return to a desirable state as quickly as possible after being impacted. In this paper, we focus on resilience for complex sociotechnical systems (STS), specifically those where safety is an important aspect. Two main desiderata for safety-critical STS to be resilient are adaptive capacity and adaptation. Formal studies integrating human cognition and social aspects are needed to quantify the capacity to adapt and the effects of adaptation. We propose a conceptual framework to elaborate on the concept of resilience of safety-critical STS, based on adaptive capacity and adaptation and how this can be formalized. A set of mechanisms is identified that is necessary for STS to have the capacity to adapt. Mechanisms belonging to adaptive capacity include situation awareness, sensemaking, monitoring, decision-making, coordination, and learning. It is posited that the two mechanisms required to perform adaptation are anticipation and responding. This framework attempts to coherently integrate the key components of the multifaceted concept of STS adaptive resilience. This can then be used to pursue the formal representation of adaptive resilience, its modeling, and its operationalization in real-world safety-critical STS.
Highlights
Resilience is a concept that has been defined in many scientific fields
This paper presents a conceptual framework for the resilience of safety-critical STS
It emphasizes the need to connect local modifications executed in a system, as a reaction to potential or occurred adversity, to a global system’s performance to model and understand
Summary
Resilience is a concept that has been defined in many scientific fields. The interpretation of what is and what is not resilience is very different and sometimes contradictory. We focus on the resilience of sociotechnical systems (STS) with an emphasis on those that are safety-critical. Safety-critical STS are open systems where both humans and technology interact with each other within an environment and where safety is a critical aspect. Examples of such systems are airports, hospitals, nuclear plants, and offshore platforms [13]
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