Resilience engineering is a subfield of safety science research that focuses on understanding how complex adaptive systems cope when encountering a surprise.
[1] Resilience engineering researchers have studied multiple safety-critical domains, including aviation, anesthesia, fire safety, space mission control, military operations, power plants, air traffic control, rail engineering, health care, and emergency response to both natural and industrial disasters.
In particular, resilience engineering researchers study how people are able to cope effectively with complexity to ensure safe system operation, especially when they are experiencing time pressure.
Instead, the assumption is that humans working in a system are always faced with goal conflicts, and limited resources, requiring them to constantly make trade-offs while under time pressure.
[11] As a consequence, adding controls to mitigate the effects of human variability can reduce safety in certain circumstances[15] Expert operators are an important source of resilience inside of systems.
The safety researcher Erik Hollnagel views resilient performance as requiring four systemic potentials:[18] This has been described in a White Paper from Eurocontrol on Systemic Potentials Management https://skybrary.aero/bookshelf/systemic-potentials-management-building-basis-resilient-performance The safety researcher David Woods considers the following two concepts in his definition of resilience:[19] These two concepts are elaborated in Woods's theory of graceful extensibility.
Woods contrasts resilience with robustness, which is the ability of a system to deal effectively with potential challenges that were anticipated in advance.
The safety researcher Richard Cook argued that bone should serve as the archetype for understanding what resilience is in the Woods perspective.