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Page last updated: 2007-03-21
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Researchers at the Division of Human-Centered Systems condact research on complex safety-critical systems where resilient behaviour is desired. Lack of resilience in such systems is also one of the new views of accident causation in our research on accident investigations.
Resilience engineering
Resilience Engineering is a new approach to safety and risk management.
Whereas conventional approaches to system safety are dominated by
hindsight and emphasise error tabulation and probabilistic risk
analysis, Resilience Engineering emphasizes an organisation's ability
to adjust its functioning, prior to or following changes and
disturbances, so that it can sustain operations even after a major
mishap or in the presence of continuous stress. Resilience has
previously proven to be a useful construct in analyzing the
persistence, stability and flexibility of ecological systems, for many
decades. Applied to engineering of safe systems, the focus is on the
following three abilities:
Accident investigation
Accident investigations both regard explaining what happened, and
proposing remedial actions. When an accident has happened, the
investigation often manages to clarify some of the causes, however, the
remedial actions should prevent a broader ranged of future accidents
than identical negative events. A complicating factor is that usually,
the more serious the accident is, the less important the triggering
event is. Serious accidents often have many latent conditions, creating
a dangerous environment, formed over a long time. These factors may
combine with a rather innocent act or event, to trigger the events
leading to an accident. Over the years, many different accident models
have been used, to describe general principles of causation and
defence, for incidents, accidents, and disasters. The models have been
developed to explain causation in accidents in systems with widely
differing characteristics. From systems of one machine operated by one
operator, to nuclear power plants with complex connections and
dependencies between parts and actors. Our research in this area
focuses on how effective remedial actions can be designed, and how that
work is affected by the explicit or implicit accident models of the
designers and analysts.
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