Using functional modelling to assess system performance and resilience in socio-technical systems

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Resilience is a concept that is at the forefront of recent discussions about the management of socio-technical systems. By most definitions, resilience is defined as the ability of a system to persist when exposed to adverse conditions or external stressors. The system is able to persist in the face of these stressors and adverse conditions due to three internal capacities: absorptive capacities, adaptive capacities, and transformative capacities. In complex socio-technical systems, it can be difficult to diagnose which of these capacities are responsible for the system's persistence. Furthermore, resilience research struggles to answer whether all forms of resilience would be desirable for improving the performance of socio-technical systems, and practically, can the understanding of specific resilient capacities be translated into useful management recommendations for these systems. Current resilience measurement approaches suggest using a single metric to measure resilience. This leads to debate around which metric might be the most appropriate to use when measuring resilience. Resilience has not been measured directly using the current approaches, it is measured by proxy metrics. This research program will outline a plan to develop a framework that measures resilience in a way which will allow researchers and practitioners to more precisely investigate resilience in socio-technical systems. The framework will provide an approach to distinguish between the three capacities of resilience. This should lead to amore informed and targeted discussion of implications arising from the measurements. This research will also couple functional system modeling to the measurement framework to enhance the tractability of these systems. The functional resonance analysis method (FRAM) will be used to develop the functional models. The coupling of functional system modelling with an improved framework for resilience quantification will enrich the study of this resilience in socio-technical system and provide an opportunity build improved resilience-based management strategies. The methodological developments in this research proposal will be tested by applying them to the Geriatric Medicine System in Newfoundland and Labrador. This system is an ideal socio-technical system for data collection activities and the testing of the methods developed in this research. The Geriatric Medicine System is a large, multi-stakeholder system that spans many disciplines. The functional modelling approach will help decipher this multi-stakeholder system, provide structure to the system, and improve tractability. Seven HQPs will be trained in this research program. HQPs in this project will gain skills in conducting experiments with human participants, investigative methods for socio-technical systems, and learn how to assess resilience in industrial safety contexts. The research area provides an opportunity for HQP to contribute to both, published literature and practice.