Modeling industrial safety: A sociotechnical systems perspective

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.