Towards a Conceptual Framework for Resilience Engineering

As systems continue to grow in size and complexity, they pose increasingly greater safety and risk management challenges. Today when complex systems fail and mishaps occur, there is an initial tendency to attribute the failure to human error. Yet research has repeatedly shown that more often than not it is not human error but organizational factors that set up adverse conditions that increase the likelihood of system failure. Resilience engineering is concerned with building systems that are able to circumvent accidents through anticipation, survive disruptions through recovery, and grow through adaptation. This paper defines resilience from different perspectives, provides a conceptual framework for understanding and analyzing disruptions, and presents principles and heuristics based on lessons learned that can be employed to build resilient systems.