When the Black Swan looms: Operationalising resilience in airports

From the 2020s onwards, our society has dealt with many high-impact crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the Suez Canal obstruction, and the Russo-Ukrainian war. These crises exposed multiple fragilities in our transportation system, supply chains and national security. In reaction to these crises, the interest in operationalising resilience by translating resilience aspiration to actionable interventions (e.g. training, products and strategies) peaked within multiple organisations. In this context, the Delft University of Technology in collaboration with the Royal Schiphol Group, the operator of Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, initiated a PhD research project to investigate how to operationalise resilience. Key to this project was its action research approach, through which I, as the PhD researcher, closely collaborated with the Innovation Hub and Operational Resilience team of the Royal Schiphol Group. This fruitful exchange between academia and practice resulted in five studies, each presented as a separate chapter, contributing a key piece to the puzzle of operationalising resilience...