Product Description: This is the fifth book published within the Ashgate Studies in Resilience Engineering series. The first volume introduced resilience engineering broadly. The second and third volumes established the research foundation for the real-world applications that then were described in the fourth volume: Resilience Engineering in Practice...read more

Resilience engineering has consistently argued that safety is more than the absence of failures. Since the first book was published in 2006, several book chapters and papers have demonstrated the advantage in going behind 'human error' and beyond the failure concept, just as a number of serious accidents have accentuated the need for it. But there has not yet been a comprehensive method for doing so; the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) fulfils that need. Whereas commonly used methods explain events by interpreting them in terms of an already existing model, the FRAM is used to model the functions that are needed for everyday performance to succeed. This model can then be used to explain specific events, by showing how functions can be coupled and how the variability of everyday performance sometimes may lead to unexpected and out-of-scale outcomes - either good or bad. The FRAM is based on four principles: equivalence of failures and successes, approximate adjustments, emergence, and functional resonance. As the FRAM is a method rather than a model, it makes no assumptions about how the system under investigation is structured or organised, nor about possible causes and cause-effect relations. Instead of looking for failures and malfunctions, the FRAM explains outcomes in terms of how functions become coupled and how everyday performance variability may resonate. This book presents a detailed and tested method that can be used to model how complex and dynamic socio-technical systems work, to understand why things sometimes go wrong but also why they normally succeed.

Product Description: The recent financial crisis has made it paramount for the financial services industry to find new perspectives to look at their industry and, most importantly, to gain a better understanding of how the global financial system can be made less vulnerable and more resilient...read more

Product Description: While a quick response can save you in a time of crisis, avoiding a crisis remains the best defense. When dealing with complex industrial systems, it has become increasingly obvious that preparedness requires a sophisticated understanding of human factors as they relate to the functional characteristics of socio-technology systems...read more

Product Description: Our fascination with new technologies is based on the assumption that more powerful automation will overcome human limitations and make our systems 'faster, better, cheaper,' resulting in simple, easy tasks for people. But how does new technology and more powerful automation change our work? Research in Cognitive Systems Engineering (CSE) looks at the intersection of people, technology, and work...read more

Product Description: This Handbook serves as a single source for theories, models, and methods related to cognitive task design. It provides the scientific and theoretical basis required by industrial and academic researchers, as well as the practical and methodological guidance needed by practitioners who face problems of building safe and effective human-technology systems...read more

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Product Description: The growing dependence of working environments on complex technology has created many challenges and lead to a large number of accidents. Although the quality of organization and management within the work environment plays an important role in these accidents, the significance of individual human action (as a direct cause and as a mitigating factor) is undeniable...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Technological development has changed the nature of industrial production so that it is no longer a question of humans working with a machine, but rather that a joint human machine system is performing the task. This development, which started in the 1940s, has become even more pronounced with the proliferation of computers and the invasion of digital technology in all wakes of working life...read more

Product Description: Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Intelligent Decision Support in Process Environments, held in San Miniato, Italy, September 16-27, 1985