Resilience Engineering Strategy Applied to an Existing Process Plant

Abstract

Resilience of a system can be defined as a set of behaviours and strategies allowing the creation of a proactive defence against disturbances and interruptions that threaten the system integrity. In analogy with the widely applied methods concerning risk assessment and inherent safety, in this paper we propose a semi-quantitative resilience evaluation framework. Starting from the basic dynamic concept defining resilience as the ability of a whole process system to cope with adverse events, a set of resilience indicators is presented to determine how resilient a process is, both from the technical and the organizational viewpoints. As a case-study, the approach is applied to an existing integral process industry, in order to manage risks through prevention, reduction and mitigation by focusing on the so-called detection potential factor.