DEVELOPING A RESILIENCE ENGINEERING CURRICULUM: REPORT FROM AN INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE

Resilience engineering (RE) has gained increasing attention from researchers and practitioners from a wide diversity of sectors and countries.  This popularity results on diverse and even conflicting views, creating confusion that can hinder developments in this area. Hence, there is a need for a theoretically based approach for increasing awareness on RE knowledge in higher education. In some university courses, such as safety management, RE can be found as a topic module. However, the far-reaching RE implications justifies dedicated courses.  This paper reports an experience of implementing a RE course at graduate level, involving faculties from four universities, three from Brazil and one from Norway.  The first edition of the course took place in 2019 with a class of ten doctorate and masters engineering students from Brazil and a lecture given to Norwegian Master students.  The course had nine distance-learning modules, comprised of the topics as follows: (i) characteristics of complex socio-technical systems and guidelines for coping with complexity; (ii) the concept of resilience and approaches for resilience assessment; (iii) performance measurement and resilience, contrasting Safety I and Safety II perspectives; (iv) RE in distributed and integrated operations; (v) digital technologies, cybersecurity and resilience; (vi) training for operational resilience capabilities; (vii) quantitative methods for resilience analysis; (viii) case studies of resilience management in critical infrastructures; (ix) student presentations of final course assignments presentation, addressing an empirical application of the course contents.  After course completion, students and faculty answered a survey to provide feedback for improvement of the course.  Improvement suggestions ranged from technical aspects of distance learning to the need for deeper discussion of topics, perceived by students as highly relevant but challenging.  Building on the pilot experience, the next edition, in 2020, will encompass an extended curriculum, additional instructors, and students from multiple countries.

This paper also discusses the extent to which the course topics account for central themes within RE, such as the four potentials of resilient systems (anticipating, monitoring, responding, and learning).  The results from the first edition of the course, its evaluation and their relation to current status of RE provide guidance towards future educational developments.