Workplace accidents and self-organized criticality

Abstract

The occurrence of workplace accidents is described within the context of selforganized criticality, a theory from statistical physics that governs a wide range of phenomena across physics, biology, geosciences, economics, and the social sciences. Workplace accident data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal a power-law relationship between the number of accidents and their severity as measured by the number of days lost from work. This power-law scaling is indicative of workplace accidents being governed by self-organized criticality, suggesting that nearly all workplace accidents have a common underlying cause, independent of their severity. Such power-law scaling is found for all labor categories documented by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Our results provide scientific support for the Heinrich accident triangle, with the practical implication that suppressing the rate of severe accidents requires changing the attitude toward workplace safety in general. By creating a culture that values safety, empowers individuals, and strives to continuously improve, accident rates can be suppressed across the full range of severities.

Sand casting safety assessment for foundry enterprises: fault tree analysis, Heinrich accident triangle, HAZOP–LOPA, bow tie model

“…There has been only one sand casting explosion accident since 2001 according to the Ministry of Emergency Management of the People's Republic of China: the aforementioned accident at the Anshan Iron and Steel Group [7]. In this study, we calculated sand casting explosion frequency based on the Heinrich accident triangle to resolve this information deficiency [25][26][27].…”

Hospital management in the COVID-19 emergency: Abelian Sandpile paradigm and beyond

“…The notion of Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) was originally introduced by Bak, Tang and Wiesenfeld [4,5] starting from a basic example proposed as a model for sandpiles (we refer to [3,22,37] for a general introduction to this broad subject). Since then, the concept has been expanded in many different directions, spanning from classical topics of physics (sandpile avalanches [27], distribution of earthquakes [35,47], amplitude of solar flares [39]) to less standard economic and socio-political contexts [2,7,9,13,24,38,42,44,52], passing through computer networks and biological applications [1,40,53,15]. At the same time, a huge effort to extend the mathematical tools to deal with theoretical questions has been made, thus contributing to drive SOC into an extraordinary crossroads of probabilistic approaches, graph theory, algebraic geometry, mathematical analysis and optimisation [6,8,10,11,12,23,28,41].…”

Study on the stability of particle packing structure based on cells

“…When driven by external forces, granular materials show a highly complex response, mainly due to the strongly dissipative, hysteretic, and nonlinear interactions. The structures of such systems is self-organized dynamically, which is of great significance in science and engineering [4][5][6][7][8][9]. A central task in this field is to study the change law of particle packing structure in self-organized systems [10].…”