Provides an introduction to resilience engineering of systems, covering both the theoretical and practical aspects. It is written for people who, as part of their work, are responsible for system safety on managerial or operational levels alike.

Contents: Resilience engineering concepts. Emergence: Resilience: the challenge of the unstable; Systems are ever-changing; Essential characteristics of resilience; Defining resilience; Nature of changes in systems; Complexity, emergence, resilience; A typology of resilience situations; Resilient systems; Incidents - markers of resilience or brittleness?; Resilience engineering: chronicling the emergence of confused consensus. Cases and Processes: Engineering resilience into safety-critical system; Is resilience really necessary? the case of railways; Systems are never perfect; Structure for management of weak and diffuse signals; Organisational resilience and industrial risk; An evil chain mechanism leading to failures; Safety management in airlines; Taking things in stride: cognitive features of two resilient performances; Erosion of managerial resilience: from Vasa to NASA; Learning how to create resilience in business systems; Optimum system safety and optimum system resilience: agonistic or antagonistic concepts?; Challenges for a practice of resilience engineering: properties of resilient organisations: an initial view; Remedies; Auditing resilience in risk control and safety management systems; How to design a safety organization: test case for resilience engineering; Rules and procedures; Distancing through differencing: an obstacle to organizational learning following accidents; States of resilience; Epilogue: Resilience engineering precepts.