This paper reviews literature that addresses applications of resilience engineering principles to various fields. Recently the concept has attracted great attention from a technical and industrial perspective. The primary focus of this paper is to review the resilience engineering applications to industrial systems with the purpose of applying them to the chemical industry. A systematic review is performed to classify peer-reviewed journal papers that are associated with resilience engineering applications into three categories: industrial systems, ecological systems, and interlinked systems. The literature in the category of industrial systems is further divided based on the type of approaches such as field studies, case studies, methodologies, and mathematical modeling. After thoroughly analyzing the literature, four key research areas are identified: Considering socio-technical factors for resilience assessment efficiently; Inculcating the possibility of multiple disasters in resilience assessment; Design optimization for resilience enhancement; Efficient restoration strategies. All these research areas have not been explored exclusively for chemical facilities to a great extent. It is concluded that if these research areas are addressed appropriately, it would help in triggering the research pertaining to the application of resilience engineering principles in chemical facilities. •Different aspects of resilience and applications in process industries were reviewed.•Key research areas and approaches in resilience engineering have been identified.•Resilience of chemical plants was addressed by possible applications.•Effects of human factors on resilience engineering have been reviewed.•Limitations and future research directions of resilience were outlined.