Holling, C.S. “Engineering resilience versus ecological resilience.” Engineering within ecological constraints 31, no. 1996 (1996): 32.
‘Engineering resilience’ is not ‘resilience engineering’. One of the most common mistakes made by experts and newcomers is to use these two terms interchangeably as if they were same. Instead, each term refers to conflicting perspectives on what resilience means in engineered systems.
On 15 March 2018, a pedestrian bridge connecting Florida International University (FIU) to the nearby town of Sweetwater collapsed on top of traffic across a 6 lane roadway below. Six people lost their lives and ten others were sent to the hospital. The bridge, which was installed just 5 days prior to the collapse, was designed to withstand a category 5 hurricane. The 174 foot span concrete truss structure weighing 950 tons was built using the Accelerated Bridge Construction (ABC) method.
Hollnagel, Erik., Building Research & Information 42, no. 2 (2014): 221-228.
Resilience engineering and the Built Environment provides a brief overview of resilience engineering concepts and how they may apply in technological systems like infrastructure. Since the field of Resilience engineering is dominated by experts in social and systems sciences, the majority of research focuses attention on people, rather than discussing the characteristics of engineered systems and their relationships to the people that operate them. This paper offers a succinct overview of several concepts critical to resilience engineering theory and acts as a primer for each one.
Authors: Wears, Robert L., and L. Kendall Webb.
Publication: Resilience engineering in practice 2 (2014): 33-46.
“Things that never happened before happen all the time” Carl Sagan (1993)
‘Surprise’ underpins all resilience engineering theory and applications. The goal of resilience is to manage unexpected and unpredictable events in a successful and positive way, and the word surprise, by and large, encapsulates anything unexpected. This means the ways that experts think about “surprise”, understand what it is, and then deal with it helps establish a basis for designing resilient systems.
