A Risk-Based Safety Resilience Framework for Brownfield Restoration Projects

Abstract

Brownfield restoration combines construction hazards with residual process risk, temporary systems, changing plant states and simultaneous operations. This framework-development paper proposes the Restoration 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 restoration case provides an author’s retrospective illustration of how reported operational records might be mapped to these dimensions. 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.