"Resilience Engineering is becoming increasingly important in the context of smart cities, smart mobility and smart industrial production, due to an increased vulnerability of such highly interconnected systems. At ZHAW Institute of Sustainable Development, we identify and evaluate emerging risks and undesired side effects of smart socio-technical systems."

Christian Zipper Dr. sc. nat. ETH
Head of Master of Advanced Studies in Integrated Risk Management (MAS IRM), School of Engineering

"To improve the management of Safety-I, we try to learn from what has gone wrong - accidents and incidents. But accidents are irregular snapshots of unusual situations. Explaining how something has gone wrong tells us nothing about what happens during everyday operations.To improve the management of Safety-II, to improve resilience, we must instead look at the everyday work situations where 'nothing happens'. It is only by understanding how the system works, that we can improve everyday performance. And it is only by understanding how the system works that we can possibly understand what happens when something goes wrong."

Erik Hollnagel Prof. Dr.University of Southern Denmark and Chief Consultant at the Centre for Quality Improvement, Region of Southern Denmark.Prof. em. at the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA)at Linköping University (LIU), Sweden. Prof. em. and Industrial SafetyChair at MINES ParisTech (formerly: École des Mines de Paris), France.

"Resilience engineering for the energy sector is even more important than ever. Due to ceasing operation and phasing out in some countries several safety issues raise from loss of knowledge, decreasing motivation and reluctance for proper planning of economically unattractive decisions. The presentation will relate the principles of Resilience engineering to such situations and will highlight the importance of proper planning aspects for a resilient remaining operation of nuclear energy or for planning a proper energy shift towards renewable energies."

Oliver Straeter Prof. Dr. phil. habil. Chair for Human Engineering, Organisational Psychology and Safety, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University Kassel, Germany; Member of the ENSI Expert Commission for the safety of Nuclear Power Plants in Switzerland.      

"Resilience is the ability to absorb and recover, is the capacity to quickly bounce back to normal after a shock.Swiss Re is interested in resilience because the impact of large catastrophes/emerging risk to society remains big. Insurance can help to transfer/finance the residual risk/loss costs originating from residual risk. Prevention measures are best to reduce damage from high frequency low severity events while for rare, disruptive events insurance can provide additional protection and helps to close the protection gap."

Reto Schneider Dr. sc. nat. ETH, Director and Head of Group Emerging Risk Management, SwissRe, Zurich, Switzerland