A framework to study the resilience of organizationsa case study of a nuclear emergency plan

Abstract

Nowadays, building resilience is a key topic in many research fields such as Management, Engineering, Psychology or Ecology. The frequency increase of natural and anthropogenic disasters and the consciousness about their effects are among the reasons why resilience has gained importance and Governments are investing money in boosting the resilience of organizations, infrastructure, cities, individuals, etc. However, there is not much research on specific methodologies to design resilient organizations. A main goal of our research is to improve this aspect providing a framework to design resilient organizations. We explain how to design resilient organizations based on the Viable System Model principles. Then, we focus on an important aspect for being resilient: the communications. We use as a case study a Nuclear Emergency Plan from Spain to show the applicability of our framework. Since the communications in an organization can be modeled as a diffusion process in multiplex networks, and we did not find any suitable architecture to study them in the context of our case study, the architecture we design in this thesis is generic and allows us to model and simulate any kind of diffusion process in a dynamic multiplex network.