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Modeling Industrial Safety: A Sociotechnical Systems Perspective - spaldhikar - 10-04-2017 Modeling Industrial Safety: A Sociotechnical Systems Perspective [attachment=17846] Abstract - Highly technological systems such as advanced manufacturing systems, aviation, telecommunications, nuclear power plants, chemical and petroleum process industry are increasingly becoming more complex, leading to new kinds of system failures and accidents. Traditional safety modeling approaches are not suitable to analyze accidents that occur in modern sociotechnical systems, where accident causation is not the result of an individual component failure or human error. This paper discusses some traditional safety models and their limitations, and describes new system-theoretic approaches to the modeling and analysis of accidents in complex systems. This paper also discusses emerging research in cognitive systems engineering, sociological analysis, and resilience engineering for safety analysis, accident modeling and safety management of complex industrial systems. I. INTRODUCTION The main goals of system safety are to prevent the occurrence of accidents in engineered systems and to reduce their consequences if they occur. The IEC 61508 safety standard [1] defines safety as, freedom from unacceptable risk of physical injury or of damage to the health of people, either directly or indirectly as a result of damage to property or to the environment . Highly technological systems such as advanced manufacturing systems, aviation, telecommunications, nuclear power plants, chemical and petroleum process industry are increasingly becoming more complex. Such complex systems can exhibit potentially disastrous failure modes [2], [3], [4], [5]. Traditional safety analysis techniques are inadequate to handle the complexities of such systems, and new promising approaches to the modeling and analysis of safety and system accidents are emerging. II. TRADITIONAL SAFETY MODELS A. Sequential Accident Models Sequential accident models explain accident causation as the result of a chain of discrete events that occur in a particular temporal order. One of the earliest sequential accident models is the Domino theory proposed by Heinrich [6]. According to this theory there are five factors in the accident sequence: 1) social environment (those conditions which make us take or accept risks); 2) fault of the person; 3) unsafe acts or conditions (poor planning, unsafe equipment, hazardous environment); 4) accident; 5) injury. II. SOCIOTECHNICAL COMPLEXITIES IN INDUSTRIAL SYSTEMS In modern complex systems, humans interact with technology and deliver outcomes as a result of their collaboration; such outcomes cannot be attained by either the humans or technology functioning in isolation. Such systems, composed of human agents and technical artifacts, are often embedded within complex social structures such as the organizational goals, policies and culture, economic, legal, political and environmental elements. Sociotechnical theory implies that human agents and social institutions are integral parts of the technical systems, and that the attainment of organizational objectives are not met by the optimization of the technical system, but by the joint optimization of the technical and social aspects [15]. |