Review of the Functional Resonance Analysis Method and other tools for resilience analysis in the construction sector

Field: Decision Sciences (Social Sciences)

The difficulty of understanding the behaviour of systems, due to their dynamism, leads to their being called complex socio-technical systems (CSS). These CSS work well most of the time, but other times they can fail in unexpected ways. Safety has generally been associated with the absence of harm and all organisational safety management has focused on reducing or eliminating these perceived negative elements. Resilience engineering (RE) addresses this shift in approach to safety, and proposes that things that go right and things that go wrong come from the same source, thus becoming a paradigm shift for safety management to deal with complexity. Therefore, a literature review of the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) and other tools for resilience analysis in the construction sector is carried out in this study. The number of studies using FRAM with a prospective approach is increasing, due to the ability of the method to contribute to the understanding of CSS behaviours. Therefore, two research questions have been posed to guide the study that are directly related to the objective of the study. This review has been conducted following the guidelines of the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) statement using the following four electronic databases: Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and ScienceDirect and PubMed. The main search string was "Title/Abs/Key". A total of 121 articles were identified with the support of the mendeley software, which after eliminating duplicates, 81 articles were obtained for the study. These articles were analysed considering the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The selected articles were analysed in full text in an excel sheet with different fields. With regard to the results, eleven studies related to resilience analysis tools in the construction sector were identified. The tools identified were FRAM, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Value Stream Mapping (VSM), Resilience Assessment Grid (RAG). FRAM could be considered the most popular method for CSS analysis, which given its versatility can analyse CSS individually or in combination with other tools. FRAM has been combined with AHP in approximately 46% of the cases analysed, 9% with VSM, 9% with RAG and 36% used individually. Relevant characteristics such as the objective of the study, data collection and definitions of resilience and variability were identified in the studies analysed, as well as some studies that defined the quantification of variability. The contribution of new concepts, qualitative and quantitative indicators, as well as the retrospective and prospective approaches proposed in the studies were identified. A SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) was carried out and conclusions were drawn for each selected study. It has been possible to conclude that due to the dynamism and characteristics of the CSS such as the construction sector, FRAM is the appropriate tool that could analyse the variability of this system individually or in combination with other tools due to its great versatility, and which could identify situations out of control and highlight factors that had not been taken into account before. Therefore, its thorough and systematic analysis provides a solid basis.