The impact of redundancy on resilience engineering in a petrochemical plant by data envelopment analysis

Abstract

Resilience engineering is a new and proactive attitude toward improving the safety and reliability of complex industrial systems such as oil and gas companies and petrochemical plants. This study aims to evaluate the effect of redundancy on a resilient system and determine which redundancy in different aspects including human resources and equipment items (hardware, software, and information) is more efficient in a resilient system through data envelopment analysis. Data collection was performed in a petrochemical plant through a questionnaire. Then, reliability of the data was calculated through Cronbach’s alpha test. Next, the effects of human redundancy and equipment redundancy on resilience engineering are examined by means of data envelopment analysis approach. The results show that efficiency of the resilient system is improved by considering both equipment redundancy and human redundancy. It is also revealed that human redundancy is more effective in resilient system performance compared to equipment redundancy. Hence, human redundancy plays a vital role in efficiency enhancement of resilient systems. This study is among the first ones that investigate the impact of the redundancy in resilient systems in different aspects including human and equipment redundancy by means of data envelopment analysis approach and highlights the gaps between managers and staff about the impact of equipment redundancy and human redundancy on resilience engineering.