Resilience and the temporal dimension – the chimera of timely response

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a framework for reasoning about ‘timely response’, and control versus the temporal organisation of a controlling system. By three empirical examples, we show how a controlling system can be described in terms of perception points, decision points and action points. Our conclusions are that (1) temporal expectancies shape our ability to exercise control at least as much our ability to understand relations and causality, but temporality is rarely part of approaches to modelling human or system performance, (2) temporal organisation of activities shape our ability to exercise control, (3) by utilising the temporal control framework, we can describe important properties of the temporal organisation of a socio-technical system, and (4) the capacity of modelling is limited to what can be known or imagined. Therefore, models describing resilience or stability should include temporality and be based on frameworks generic enough to be applied to a wide variety of situations.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience engineering
• time
• temporal expectancies
• temporal organisation
• decision-making

Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the Swedish Transport Administration, and the LFV Air Navigation Services of Sweden, through the project Amplify Teamwork with Automation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. An area in the municipality.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the Swedish Transport Administration, and the LFV Air Navigation Services of Sweden, through the project Amplify Teamwork with Automation.

Notes on contributors

Björn Johan Erik Johansson

Björn J. E. Johansson (Associate Professor, Cognitive Science, Ph.D. in Cognitive Systems) is an adjunct lecturer at the Department for Computer Science at Linköping University. Björn's research focus is on Cognitive Systems Engineering, Resilience Engineering, Command and Control, and Communication. He has worked and works in several different projects concerned with crisis management and information technology, air traffic management as well as command and control systems and agility.

Jonas Lundberg

Jonas Lundberg is a Senior Lecturer in Information Design at Linköping University, Sweden. His research has addressed methods for systematic safety work, and design of interactive information environments. He has led and participated in projects across application domains, such as Aviation and Traffic Management, Emergency and Crisis Response. He was awarded Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2005 by Linköping University.