Resilience of complex systems in modern contexts : sense-making of deviations and enabling the human for mitigating unwanted events and incidents

Over the last few decades, the scale and nature of industrial transformations have been quite substantial generating new solutions with inherent technical, operational, and organisational complexities. Modern industrial systems in both public and private sectors are engineered and operated under demanding conditions where faults, failures, and malfunctions represent a relatively higher degree of risk in terms of safety, security, environmental impact, and economy. In such new emerging contexts, the understanding of inherent abnormalities, ability to identify early-deviations, advancing situation awareness, and taking precautionary measures much earlier are critical for mitigating inherent potentials for unwanted events and incidents and thus ensuring resilience of complex industrial systems. This paper explores and elaborates on these aspects further in detail based on an ongoing research project. Subsequently, analysis of two major industrial accidents is performed to understand the patterns of deviations and lost opportunities from the perspectives of accident prevention and impact mitigation.