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Looking at resilience of socio-technical systems from the view of coordinated control

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Abstract

Resilience is a topic widely discussed in the system safety community yet with various conceptualizations which have not been fully converged in principle. Characterization of resilience of socio-technical systems is then left open to be interpreted by alternative means. As one of the means, coordinated control theory (CCT) can explain a mechanism that enables the systems to achieve adaptations constantly in response to consecutive disturbances and changes. This article presents a theoretical viewpoint for depicting continuity of a system’s resilient performance, based on coordinated control, as understanding of safety degradation and accident incubation in socio-technical systems. The theoretical viewpoint was exemplified, via preliminary analysis of resilient processes in the practical context of combining air crash LNI610, Lion Air, Indonesia, 2018 and its pre-accident story. This article also demonstrates the potential that the CCT view of resilience supports the high reliability organization (HRO) theory, by conceptually visualizing the HROs’ characteristics that have been well grounded in empirical observations, and comparing the visualized state space models that describe HROs and regular organizations respectively. The CCT insights into resilient performance and processes of a system/organization make theoretical sense how to maintain system states aligned with coordinated control principles, thereby enhancing the system’s capacity for adapting to a dynamic and uncertain work environment. Future research will focus on refining the proposed framework for descriptions of input/output behaviors of the resilient systems, as well as addressing self-organization contributing to growth of the systems’ adaptive capacity.

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  1. School of Reliability and Systems Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Jin Tian & Ying Dai

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  1. Jin Tian
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  2. Ying Dai
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Correspondence to Jin Tian.

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Tian, J., Dai, Y. Looking at resilience of socio-technical systems from the view of coordinated control. Cogn Tech Work 24, 147–160 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-020-00650-z

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