The Relevance of Resilience Engineering and Community Resilience for Future Maritime Transport Systems

Maritime transport systems are becoming increasingly interconnected, automated, and complex. This paper presents the MARMAN (Maritime Resilience Management of an Integrated Transport System) project financed by the Norwegian research council for the period from 2021 to 2024. Implementation automated vessels will increase the complexity, change the interconnection between actors and change ways of working. Resilience is one of the main theoretical approaches in the project. Even though resilience perspectives are relatively new in safety studies, the resilience concept is increasingly reported in safety studies and literature. The resilience concept is used in different contexts, such as healthcare, aviation, chemical and petrochemical industry, nuclear power plants, and railways. The concept represents a proactive management approach and principles for handling both normal operations and unexpected events. There are differences between the organisational practices between countries and sectors. This includes emphasizing different aspects and variables.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an initial framework addressing future challenges when implementing autonomous vessels in maritime transport systems. Resilience Engineering and Community Resilience are used as theoretical perspectives.