Proceedings of the fourth Resilience Engineering Symposium

These proceedings document the various presentations at the Fourth Resilience
Engineering Symposium held on June 8-10, 2011, in Sophia-Antipolis, France.
The Symposium gathered participants from five continents and provided them
with a forum to exchange experiences and problems, and to learn about
Resilience Engineering from the latest scientific achievements to recent
practical applications. The First Resilience Engineering Symposium was held in
Söderköping, Sweden, on October 25-29 2004. The Second Resilience Engineering
Symposium was held in Juan-les-Pins, France, on November 8-10 2006, The Third
Resilience Engineering Symposium was held in Juan-les-Pins, France, on October
28-30 2008. Since the first Symposium, resilience engineering has fast become
recognised as a valuable complement to the established approaches to safety.
Both industry and academia have recognised that resilience engineering offers
valuable conceptual and practical basis that can be used to attack the
problems of interconnectedness and intractability of complex socio-technical
systems. The concepts and principles of resilience engineering have been
tested and refined by applications in such fields as air traffic management,
offshore production, patient safety, and commercial fishing. Continued work
has also made it clear that resilience is neither limited to handling threats
and disturbances, nor confined to situations where something can go wrong.
Today, resilience is understood as 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 both expected and unexpected
conditions. This definition emphasizes the ability to continue functioning,
rather than simply to react and recover from disturbances and the ability to
deal with diverse conditions of functioning, expected as well as unexpected.
For anyone who is interested in learning more about Resilience Engineering,
the books published in the Ashgate Studies in Resilience Engineering provide
an excellent starting point. Another sign that Resilience Engineering is
coming of age is the establishment of the Resilience Engineering Association.
The goal of this association is to provide a forum for coordination and
exchange of experiences, by bringing together researchers and professionals
working in the Resilience Engineering domain and organisations applying or
willing to apply Resilience Engineering principles in their operations. The
Resilience Engineering Association held its first General Assembly during the
Fourth Symposium, and will in the future play an active role in the
organisation of symposia and other activities related to Resilience
Engineering.