Resilience Engineering—Agents of Open Pit Mining Machine Disasters in Poland

Resilience is defined as readiness for secure and acceptable service under abnormal work conditions (e.g. disruptions, attacks, accidences, disaster). The paper shows possibilities of disruption process analysis for real engineering machines. The expert analysis of disasters creates a unique opportunity to address the real catastrophic events concerned excavators and spreaders in Polish open pit mining. Total number of undesired events has reached 235 and affected 95 machines. Only 23% of all machines were not involved in a large breakdown. The most frequent catastrophic events dealt with impact load (120 events) and failure of the system rotating machine body (67 events). The problem is described by 6 particular cases.