This Mini symposium has an objective to share the knowledge in both risk and physical asset management. It is intended to create a platform for common understanding of the role and value provided by the physical asset management functions, especially in conditions of significant uncertainties (related to climate change, new technologies, market evolution, changing regulatory framework, malicious human actions, extreme weather events, pandemics, etc.) in modern organizations. Such a context creates the complexity of their operational and business environment. This complexity is not always well understood, and cannot be efficiently controlled. Such a complex world offers extraordinary opportunities for advances and prosperity in all spheres of life and activities. However, this complex world has become highly fragile and vulnerable to failure at all scales, posing serious threats to society, even when external shocks/disruptions are absent. The latest case of the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates the above. It is affecting both all sectors of life and businesses worldwide. It convincingly shows that we need to think, plan and act globally in order to deal with such situations that will also take place in the future. Thus, modern organizations have to find ways of coping with this reality to remain economically viable. We are of opinion that the concepts of structured Asset Management (AM) and resilience put together may provide an efficient framework in this regard.

In the presence of ongoing global competition and increasing demands from stakeholders, all companies have begun to focus on achieving higher performances, i.e. higher quality of their products/services, lower costs, and sustainability control while facing numerous above mentioned challenges. Moreover, the currently operating companies should be resilient to both internal and external hazards in a hyper-connected and complex world. To achieve these goals, effective management of physical assets becomes particularly important. This implies the necessity of proper performance of maintenance tasks, especially in the fields of setting pre-asset acquisition strategies for planning and initiating assets, asset operation and maintenance, performance monitoring, together with allied asset accounting and economics, or audit and renewal analysis. Additionally, the maintenance and asset managers should incorporate operational and business risks associated with their activities into their decision-making processes. This means, for example, using appropriate risk management models and assessing the level of risk maturity. In addition, it involves evaluating systems for their resilience to risks in manufacturing and supply chains.