Toward quantifying metrics for rail-system resilience: identification and analysis of performance weak resilience signals

Abstract

This paper aims to enhance tangibility of the resilience engineering concept by facilitating understanding and operationalization of weak resilience signals (WRSs) in the rail sector. Within complex socio-technical systems, accidents can be seen as unwanted outcomes emerging from uncontrolled sources of entropy (functional resonance). Various theoretical models exist to determine the variability of system interactions, the resilience state and the organization's intrinsic abilities to reorganize and manage their functioning and adaptive capacity to cope with unexpected and unforeseen disruptions. However, operationalizing and measuring concrete and reliable manifestations of resilience and assessing their impact at a system level have proved to be a challenge. A multimethod, ethnographic observation and resilience questionnaire, were used to determine resilience baseline conditions at an operational rail traffic control post. This paper describes the development, implementation and initial validation of WRSs identified and modeled around a 'performance system boundary.' In addition, a WRS analysis function is introduced to interpret underlying factors of the performance WRSs and serves as a method to reveal potential sources of future resonance that could comprise system resilience. Results indicate that performance WRSs can successfully be implemented to accentuate relative deviations from resilience baseline conditions. A WRS analysis function can help to interpret these divergences and could be used to reveal (creeping) change processes and unnoticed initiating events that facilitate emergence that degrades rail-system resilience. Establishing relevant change signals in advance can contribute to anticipation and awareness, enhance organizational learning and stimulate resilient courses of action and adaptive behavior that ensures rail operation reliability.

Team reflection makes resilience-related knowledge explicit through collaborative sensemaking: observation study at a rail post

“…This visibility, to stimulate and support discussion, can be obtained by the reflecting team through a tool presenting a view with analysis functions on its shift. The view should present movements towards the system boundaries relative to a previous period (De Regt et al 2016;Siegel and Schraagen 2014c). In this research, we focus only on the performance boundary as an example of the presentation and analysis which are needed for all the system boundaries (i.e.…”

“…To facilitate team reflection, we developed a prototype, named Resiliencerperformance, which presents movements towards the performance boundary and provides simple analysis functions to retrieve the data behind the daily movements. In order to motivate team reflection on topics related to resilience, we captured movements of the operating system (OS) towards and from the boundaries as described in our previous research (De Regt et al 2016;Siegel and Schraagen 2014a, c). In this paper, we focus only on the performance boundary and particularly on punctuality.…”

Review article: Towards resilient vital infrastructure systems – challenges, opportunities, and future research agenda

“…As an example, the Sand Motor mega-nourishment (Stive et al, 2013;De Schipper et al, 2016), located near the most densely populated region in the Netherlands is an innovative way to promote resilience of the coastal communities to climate-change-driven hazards, by not only increasing the area available for recreation and creating new opportunities for the beach tourism industry but also improving coastal safety in the long term due to increased dune growth. Such a solution improves the system's ability to absorb storm events, as wider beaches dissipate more wave energy, hence reducing erosion of the dunes (natural flood defense) and supporting recovery of the dunes by windblown sand transport (Galiforni Silva et al, 2019).…”

Using telephone call rates and nurse-to-patient ratios as measures of resilient performance under high patient flow conditions

“…Others (Ouedraogo et al, 2013;De Regt et al, 2016;Enjalbert et al, 2017) have developed indicators of resilience based on constructs from humanmachine systems (HMS) engineering and ecology. The generalizability of these indicators to intentional systems (Vicente, 1999) such as the VHVI is unclear for two reasons: 1) The assumptions they make about HMS may not be appropriate to intentional social systems like VHVI.…”