ABSTRACT
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (2003) defines resilience as:
The Oxford English Dictionary, Edition II, similarly defines resilience to be:
and resiliency as:
Concern over the resilience of technological and sociotechnical systems (Hollnagel, 2006; Leveson et al., 2006; Weick and Sutcliffe,
2007) has existed for a long time. For instance, early in the history of aviation, Jackman et al. (1910) noted:
Below, we review a variety of different approaches to the design of a resilient human-machine system from a cognitive systems engineering perspective (Smith et al., 2008). Like the classic definitions of resilience provided above, these approaches emphasize “recovery.” However, unlike some of these definitions, in some resilient systems this recovery does not necessarily return the system to its “original shape” or “state.” Rather, the recovery can be a transition to some new, but acceptable or desirable state. In addition, the discussion below emphasizes different conceptual approaches for designing resilience into the system, including methods that rely on having an engaged human operator (or distributed team of operators) present to deal with unanticipated scenarios (Guerlain, et al., 1999), as well as methods that rely upon technology or, more accurately, that rely upon the ability of the designers to predict possible scenarios and to incorporate appropriate coping mechanisms into the technology (Leveson et al., 2006).
