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Challenges in Designing Resilient Socio-technical Systems: A Case Study of Railway Tunnel Projects

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Author

Editor

  • Erik Hollnagel
  • Eric Rigaud
  • Denis Besnard

Summary, in English

This paper presents a case study of decision-making at the design stage of a socio-technical system where resilience at the global level of the system was constrained by the local perspectives adopted by the different stakeholders. The study is based on interviews with key decision-makers involved in the design stage of six railway tunnel projects in Sweden. The results show that differences in roles and perspectives among the involved actors created double binds and led to extensive discussions and deadlocks during decision-making in the majority of the studied projects. In these projects agreements could only be reached by relying on the outcome from previous railway tunnel projects, regardless differences in project-specific aspects. A significant impact from local actors during decision-making increased the potential for suboptimizations and resulted in a limited focus on the system’s resilience from a regional and national perspective. The findings point at the need for more emphasis in the field of resilience engineering on crossorganisational aspects in order to gain increased understanding of the challenges related to improving resilience of socio-technical systems.

Department/s

Publishing year

2011

Language

English

Publication/Series

Proceedings of the fourth resilience engineering symposium

Document type

Conference paper

Publisher

Presses des Mines

Topic

  • Other Civil Engineering
  • Social Sciences Interdisciplinary
  • Building Technologies

Keywords

  • Resilience Engineering

Conference name

Resilience Engineering Symposium, 2011

Conference date

2011-06-08 - 2011-06-10

Conference place

Sophia Antipolis, France

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISBN: 9782911256479