Ricerc@Sapienza

Critical Infrastructures (CI) are one of the biggest and the most complex Socio-Technical Systems (STS) deserving particular attention in managing operational risks and safety. In modern industrial plants, for example, an increasing complexity emerges due to tight couplings and interactions among technical and social agents. Besides the technical analysis, it is necessary to consider the influences between human and organizational factors, both in everyday work and in abnormal situations.
The characteristics of incidents involving such complex systems (interdependent, multi-sectoral, multi-stakeholder¿) require analysis of the interactions among functions and agents from different perspectives. These analyses should be able to help identifying transient and potentially hidden interactions and help prioritise actions to cover resilience gaps.
While the traditional approaches (Safety I) try to eliminate causes and improve barriers, which sometimes comes at the cost of increasing the complexity of the system and increasing the risk of error or deviation, the Resilience Engineering (or `Safety II¿) is a complementary approach where attention is focused to the system¿s abilities to perform and to succeed in varying conditions.
Resilience approaches are built on the assumption that not all disruptive events involving complex CI systems can be prevented and that there is a need to create more resilient CIs that can reduce chances of a shock, absorb it and quickly adapt to new contingent or prevailing conditions.
Despite its disruptive and powerful vision, resilience engineering (or `Safety II¿) is still at its infancy, mainly investigated at conceptual and theoretical level, with very limited real world demonstrations and validations.
The research project aims at covering this knowledge gap and answering to the need for safer and more resilient critical infrastructure networks (e.g. railway systems) or installations (e.g. chemical facility).