Park, Jeryang, Thomas P. Seager, Palakurth Suresh Chandra Rao, Matteo Convertino, and Igor Linkov. Risk Analysis 33, no. 3 (2013): 356-367.
Integrating risk and resilience approaches to catastrophe management in engineering systems provides a basis for understanding resilience analysis as a complementary approach to risk analysis. Previously, resilience theory in complex systems was dominated by ecologists and non-engineers. Park et al. argue that these perspectives on resilience are inappropriate for complex engineering systems because technologies are created with human intention. The authors characterize the prevailing perspective underlying engineering intention as risk management. Then, the authors demonstrate that existing risk management practices are challenged by complex and unpredictable behavior of built systems, where resilience is best understood as a complimentary way to design engineered systems capable of handling unknown situations. The authors define three challenges for the development of resilience analysis as a complimentary approach to risk analysis: the need for continuous system management, the need to accept incompleteness in models and design, and the need to embrace new ways of design thinking. The authors provide further detail on how continuous management works in engineering systems through a detailed case study on the use of activated floodways to protect cities during unprecedented Mississippi river flooding in 2011. Building on resilience engineering literature, the authors define continuous management through recursive sociotechnical processes to sense, anticipate, adapt to, and learn from changes during the use phase of engineering projects. These processes differ from this found in other resilience engineering literature (c.f., Hollnagel 2014 (add link)), and provide a useful framework for understanding how infrastructure operators act during unexpected crises.