A Systemic Approach to Organizational Safety Modeling and Analysis

Abstract

The structural and behavioral complexity of modern safety-critical organizations, such as incident management organizations, air navigation service providers, power plants, increases with every passing year. Such organizations are characterized by nonlinear dynamics involving many interrelated actors and processes. Safety issues that emerge from these complex dynamics remain increasingly hidden, until an incident or even a serious accident occurs. Traditional safety analysis methods developed long ago for much simpler organizations cannot help identifying, explaining and predicting many safety-related properties of modern organizations. To address this issue, in the paper a formal approach is proposed to establish relations between local dynamics of actors of a complex safety-critical organization and global safety-related properties that emerge from these dynamics. In contrast to the traditional approaches the organizational dynamics are specified by taking the agent perspective with an organizational layer. The approach is illustrated by a simulation case study, in which spread of safety-critical information in an air navigation service provider is investigated.

Exploring Safety Culture in Urban Air Mobility: System of Systems Perspectives Using Enterprise Architecture

“…Both include human operators (with their behaviors, beliefs, subjectivity, and personal aspects), organizational structures, management styles and rules, policies, technical processes, and human-made systems. Systematic evaluations demonstrated value in understanding the relationship between employee learning and organizational supportive conditions [18,19]. Moreover, a systemic approach is suggested for managing the paradoxical states and balancing organizational dynamics [20].…”

“…When it comes to modeling safety or just culture, previous findings suggest that several factors, including employees learning from behavioral outcomes, the presence of supportive conditions, and the maintenance of consistency over time, could influence the development of safety culture [18]. Systematic evaluation of safety culture in socio-technical organizations also highlighted the impact of the formal structure of organizations and the values and beliefs that drive individual behavior within organizations [19].…”