Development of Early Warning Indicators based on Resilience Engineering

This paper describes a new method for the development of early warning indicators based on resilience and Resilience Engineering. This resilience based early warning indicator (REWI) method consists of three main parts. The first part is a set of contributing success factors being attributes of resilience, the second part is general issues for each of the contributing success factors ensuring that the goal of each contributing success factor is fulfilled, and the third part is the indicators established for each general issue, i.e., the way of measuring the general issues. This research has shown that it is possible to develop 'an indicator system' based on resilience engineering theory from which early warning indicators can be established. It may be used as a stand-alone system, or indicators established by other approaches may be included for the final selection of indicators. Further work is necessary in order to investigate to what degree these resilience based indicators are complementary to other safety performance indicators, for instance whether they provide a more appropriate measure of the ability to 'cope with the unexpected'.