this presentation provides a review regarding the advancements in sociotechnical system safety. the review outlines a two-phase transition: phase 1: barrier engineering, where the focus is on “fail-safe” design and reliability assessment of safety-critical systems; phase 2: resilience engineering, which is a shift toward “safe-to-fail” designs that prioritize absorbing shocks and optimizing time-dependent recovery trajectories. the presentation will summarize the operational characteristics of safety-critical systems and discusses the performance of metrics and modeling approaches. more attention is paid to some recent studies on modeling and assessment of cascading failures and roles of safety barriers in mitigating these failures. then, the presentation will conceptualize resilience enhancers and introduce how these entities or non-entitative methods can be evaluated. finally, some recent relevant research projects will be presented.