ABSTRACT
Resilience is the intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under expected and unexpected conditions. This definition focuses on the ability to function, rather than on being impervious to failure, and thereby overcomes the traditional conflict between productivity and safety. Resilience engineering has fast become recognized as a valuable complement to the established approaches to safety of complex socio-technical systems and methods to assess organizational resilience are needed. However, few, if any, comprehensive and systematic research studies focus on developing an objective, reliable and practical evaluation model for measuring organizational resilience. Most of methods cannot fully solve the subjectivity of resilience evaluation. To remedy this deficiency, the aim of this research is to adopt a Fuzzy Set Theory (FST) approach for resilience measurement in organizations based on leading safety performance indicators, defined according to the resilience engineering principles. The method uses FST concepts and properties to model the indicators and to assess the results of their application. To exemplify the method we performed an exploratory case study at the radiopharmaceuticals dispatch package sector of a radiopharmaceuticals production facility.
