Proceedings of the
35th European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL2025) and
the 33rd Society for Risk Analysis Europe Conference (SRA-E 2025)
15 – 19 June 2025, Stavanger, Norway
Resilience Engineering - Theoretical and Practical Reflections on a 20-Year Journey
1Studio Apertura, NTNU Social Research AS, Norway.
2Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, Sweden.
3Department of Science and Technology, Linköping University, Sweden
4Department of Management and Engineering, Linköping university, Sweden.
5SHARE – Centre for Resilience in Healthcare, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Stavanger, Norway.
ABSTRACT
In 2004, within Resilience Engineering (RE), resilience, was understood as system's ability to sustain required system function prior, during and in the aftermath of an adverse event. By 2024, this understanding has evolved to view resilience as a "verb" and not a property, related to a systems's ability to perform under varying conditions and being able to respond to both disturbances and opportunities. Perceptions of what resilience is, what it does, what it applies to and how it can be fostered have diversified across disciplines, application domains and communities of practice. This paper critically discusses on the challenges and opportunities that arise from the wide application of the term "resilience", particularly within the RE community. The paper further investigates fundamentals, concepts, methods and practical applications related to RE. The main objective is to provide a critical overview of both the achieved progress and challenges in terms of impact to both theory and practice.
Keywords: Complexity, Trade-offs, Critical Infrastructures, Societal Resilience, Aviation, Maritime, Healthcare.
