A Risk-Based Safety Resilience Framework for Brownfield Projects

Abstract

Brownfield projects combine construction hazards with residual process risk, temporary systems, changing plant states and simultaneous operations. This framework-development paper proposes the Risk-Based Safety Resilience Index (RSRI) as a structure for organizing evidence, not as a validated measure of safety performance. Four resilience potentials—Anticipation, Monitoring, Response and Learning—are linked to Interface Coordination and Operational Readiness. An anonymized Saudi Arabian brownfield project context illustrates how qualitative evidence could be mapped to these dimensions. All numerical case values in Tables 3–4 and Figure 5 are synthetic examples, not project measurements. A qualitative evidence-quality assessment distinguishes completeness, contemporaneity, independent verification and recurrence information. Incomplete item-level provenance and the absence of independent coding prevent calculation of a defensible empirical project score; all numerical RSRI examples are therefore confined to a worked-example appendix under author-proposed assumptions. Permit Interaction Load is presented separately as a proposed future metric and was not operationalized in the case. Comments from nine practitioners inform wording refinement only. The contribution is a transparent evidence-mapping proposal, a set of source-quality constraints and a testable validation pathway. Independent double-coding, expert calibration and prospective multi-project testing remain prerequisites for measurement claims or score-based assurance decisions.