Development and measurement of a resilience indicator for cyber-socio-technical systems: the allostatic load

Management of cyber-socio-technical processes often suffers from misalignments of process descriptions according to formal organization documents or manager views (Work-As-Imagined) with actual work practices as performed by sharp-end operators (Work-As-Done). Even if sometimes the accomplishment of a process requires workers to diverge from the Work-As-Imagined, the corresponding changes can potentially cause organisational tensions in the overall system and lead to safety incidents. This consideration led us to define a new resilience indicator, named allostatic load, to capture such misalignments, and the corresponding level of organisational tensions, a cyber-socio-technical system is exposed to. Then, we propose a method to measure it by leveraging semantic technologies, the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) to model industrial processes, the WAx conceptual framework to keep track of the variety of the different process perspectives, and a crowd-based approach to elicit industrial knowledge. Finally, we discuss the feasibility of the approach in two real case studies related to a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant and an enterprise in the aluminium sector.

© 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).