For Resilience Engineering, 'failure' is the result of the adaptations necessary to cope with the complexity of the real world, rather than a malfunction. Human performance must continually adjust to current conditions and, because resources and time are finite, such adjustments are always approximate. Featuring contributions from leading international figures in human factors and safety, Resilience Engineering provides thought-provoking insights into system safety as an aggregate of its various components - subsystems, software, organizations, human behaviours - and the way in which they interact.

Contents: Preface; Prologue: resilience engineering concepts, David D. Woods and Erik Hollnagel. Emergence: Resilience: the challenge of the unstable, Erik Hollnagel; Systems are ever-changing, Yushi Fujita; Essential characteristics of resilience, David D. Woods; Defining resilience, Andrew Hale and Tom Heijer; Nature of changes in systems, Yushi Fujita; Complexity, emergence, resilience, Jean Pariès; A typology of resilience situations, Ron Westrum; Resilient systems, Yushi Fujita; Incidents - markers of resilience or brittleness?, David D. Woods and Richard I. Cook; Resilience engineering: chronicling the emergence of confused consensus, Sidney Dekker. Cases and Processes: Engineering resilience into safety-critical systems, Nancy Leveson, Nicolas Dulac, David Zipkin, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, John Carroll and Betty Barrett; Is resilience really necessary? the case of railways, Andrew Hale and Tom Heijer; Systems are never perfect, Yushi Fujita; Structure for management of weak and diffuse signals, Lars Axelsson; Organisational resilience and industrial risk, Nick McDonald; An evil chain mechanism leading to failures, Yushi Fujita; Safety management in airlines, Arthur Dijkstra; Taking things in one's stride: cognitive features of two resilient performances, Richard I. Cook and Christopher Nemeth; Erosion of managerial resilience: from Vasa to NASA, Rhona Flin; Learning how to create resilience in business systems, Gunilla Sundström and Erik Hollnagel; Optimum system safety and optimum system resilience: agonistic or antagonistic concepts?, René Amalberti. Challenges for a Practice of Resilience Engineering: Properties of resilient organisations: an initial view, John Wreathall; Remedies, Yushi Fujita; Auditing resilience in risk control and safety management systems, Andrew Hale, Frank Guldenmund and Louis Goossens; How to design a safety organization: test case for resilience engineering, David D. Woods; Rules and procedures, Yushi Fujita; Distancing throu