These proceedings document the various presentations at the Fourth Resilience

Engineering Symposium held on June 8-10, 2011, in Sophia-Antipolis,

France. The Symposium gathered participants from five continents and provided

them with a forum to exchange experiences and problems, and to learn about

Resilience Engineering from the latest scientific achievements to recent practical

applications.

The First Resilience Engineering Symposium was held in Söderköping, Sweden,

on October 25-29 2004. The Second Resilience Engineering Symposium was

held in Juan-les-Pins, France, on November 8-10 2006, The Third Resilience

Engineering Symposium was held in Juan-les-Pins, France, on October 28-30

2008. Since the first Symposium, resilience engineering has fast become

recognised as a valuable complement to the established approaches to safety.

Both industry and academia have recognised that resilience engineering offers

valuable conceptual and practical basis that can be used to attack the problems

of interconnectedness and intractability of complex socio-technical systems. The

concepts and principles of resilience engineering have been tested and refined

by applications in such fields as air traffic management, offshore production,

patient safety, and commercial fishing. Continued work has also made it clear that

resilience is neither limited to handling threats and disturbances, nor confined

to situations where something can go wrong. Today, resilience is understood

as the intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or

following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations

under both expected and unexpected conditions. This definition emphasises

the ability to continue functioning, rather than simply to react and recover

from disturbances and the ability to deal with diverse conditions of functioning,

expected as well as unexpected. For anyone who is interested in learning more

about Resilience Engineering, the books published in the Ashgate Studies in

Resilience Engineering provide an excellent starting point.

Another sign that Resilience Engineering is coming of age is the establishment of

the Resilience Engineering Association. The goal of this association is to provide

a forum for coordination and exchange of experiences, by bringing together

researchers and professionals working in the Resilience Engineering domain

and organisations applying or willing to apply Resilience Engineering principles

in their operations. The Resilience Engineering Association held its first General

Assembly during the Fourth Symposium, and will in the future play

an active role in the organisation of symposia and other activities

related to Resilience Engineering.