Journal of System Safety
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Global Warming and System Safety
Get PDFWe are currently confronted with the existential challenge of global warning. Because of its nature it is a challenge that confronts the entire globe both in terms of contributing factors and bearing the consequences. In both aspects there is an inevitable balance of responsibilities and consequences. In the former, some national entities are bigger contributors to the problem than others and in a similar manner some global areas suffer relatively more significant negative consequences. Another major challenge has been that of generating a better scientific understanding of the relationships between greenhouse gas emission, global warming, and the resulting environmental consequences. The remaining challenges that follow are how best to prevent or minimise greenhouse gas emissions, how to store them safety and how to mitigate the potential negative consequences. These are now global level responsibilities. At first sight this appears to be a problem restricted to big science, technology, and engineering alone in terms of finding more acceptable forms of energy production, as a counter to our current dependence on fossil fuels and that it might not be an area where system safety can play a prominent part. However, this is not the case, and this paper explores the system safety application possibilities, because all new developments require to be implemented in a safe manner
System Safety In The News
Get PDFDocument Reveals that 2016 EgyptAir Crash Likely Caused by Oxygen Mask and Cigarette
OSHA Asks Amazon to Improve Safety Procedures After Six Employees Die in Tornad
From the Editor's Desk
Get PDFOver the years some authors have asked about whether the JSS was indexed as this would influence their decision to publish in our journal. Unfortunately, the answer was no. We looked into the subject of indexing, but could not muster the resources to make much progress, until now. Stephen Thomas, one of our associate editors, has recently done an excellent job on the indexing issue. The JSS has now been indexed by a number of providers: Google Scholar, Crossref, ROAD, SafetyLit, BASE, Internet Archive Scholar, Dimensions, Unpaywall, UlrichsWeb, OCLC Worldcat and Fatcat. This should increase the visibility of the JSS to a wide audience. We anticipate that this will increase academic interest which will result in more submissions and possibly more membership for the ISSS
TBD
Get PDFI realized that the fire-building exercise might be an almost perfect analogy to what I have been hoping to foster within the International System Safety Society (ISSS), the system safety profession or anything else applicable to this journal. Let me try to explain the connection.
For the past few decades, I have been hoping to do something to assist the ISSS in growing and becoming an organization that is as important and influential as I know it should be. I am convinced that the system safety process is highly effective and efficient at reducing risks while adding important fiscal and social value to products and systems of all kinds. I believe it is the duty/role of the ISSS to foster that process and help expand it into all industries and processes worldwide. The dual approach of integrating engineering and management practices into the process of designing, implementing and “fielding” products and systems holds the promise of a better, safer, more environmentally appropriate future. In short, I think it is a big deal
The Delta Variant
Get PDFNothing is harder than to realize when you are living through history. For most of us, each day is pretty much like another. There is nothing historically remarkable about that. Occasionally, however, our lives are punctuated by events, both natural and man-made, that are apocalyptic and often (but not always) beyond our control – natural disasters, war, pestilence, and famine. These are the events that the historian must recognize. At this time, it is the COVID-19 pandemic that demands to be recorded by “his-story” so that posterity will know what we did right, and what we did wrong. This author has taken up the challenge of producing accurate, unbiased, comprehensive, technical annals of the global coronavirus pandemic that began in 2019. “The Delta Variant” is the third publication in this series. We are now near the end of the third year of the pandemic (summer/fall 2021). As predicted by this author, it has been a draconian year. Last year’s peak in the number of active cases was not a global maximum for the pandemic in the U.S., since this year the number of active cases has already surpassed it. Without knowing where the global maximum lies, no accurate predictions can be made about the magnitude and duration of this modern plague. The “Delta Variant” (δ-variant) of COVID-19 has greatly complicated efforts to combat the virus. The “anti-vaxxer” movement, uncontrolled migration of people into and within the U.S, and the relaxation of safety measures during the late spring and early summer in the U.S. also contributed difficulties. All of these problems were foreseen by the author and were discussed in the second paper (“Vaccine Safety”) of this series on the COVID pandemic. However, our biggest problem in the U.S. was an over confidence born of a natural summertime trough in the daily infection rate. We wanted to believe the infection was past, so we ignored the experience of India, and our administrators fueled our hopes with their words and actions. We believed because we wanted to believe – except for this author. So, what went wrong? What is a δ-variant, and why is it so dangerous? That will be the topic of this publication
TBD
Get PDFAs a long time, System Safety engineer, working on major programs that implement system safety programs in accordance with Mil-Std-882, I understand that the topic of this post is rather controversial since it questions one of the main tenets of the profession – that a formal risk assessment based upon a pre-established Risk Assessment Matrix is a necessary part of the process
Augmenting an Incident Dataset with ChatGPT
Get PDFThe field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is evolving at a rapid rate, impacting ways of working across multiple industries including that of System Safety. One area of NLP is the development of advanced language models, notably ChatGPT—which is essentially a powerful artificial intelligence chatbot powered by a large language model. This paper takes an incident report dataset and augments it with ChatGPT to improve searching capability and provide answers to safety related queries. It is shown that incident datasets can be further adapted for knowledge retrival to support safety queries, however, a major limitation to deploying this method elsewhere are data protection policies. The underpinning vector database (used to retrieve relevant incident reports) demonstrated a useful semantic search ability for more accurate and meaningful searches of incident datasets. It is considered that if the outputs provide evidence or sources behind answers, and are used for advisory purposes then they can form useful tools for information and knowledge retrieval in System Safety
The Importance of Safety Equity in Transportation System Safety
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Public transportation in the U.S. often relies on multi-modal components that represent a system of systems as exemplified by transit rail. Currently, transit rail safety is measured for individual railroads as the number of events/fatalities/injuries by productivity level (typically, revenue miles). Barriers for measuring the safety of the transit transportation system of systems include the aggregation of transit properties for a passenger’s trip and the varieties of safety management systems used by transit agencies.
An alternative perspective asks how safe passengers are, instead of how safe railroads are. It posits a fundamental shift to a human-centric perspective on transportation system safety which is the foundation for determining the level of transportation safety equity outcomes. The major barrier to ensuring safety equity outcomes is a lack of safety data for subgroups of the population, based on biodemographic, socioeconomic and disability data. These data are essential for determining if safety levels are equal across subgroups of the population, or if transportation safety inequities exist. If safety outcomes differ across subgroups of the popula-tion, then root causes for the disparity need to be determined and mitigated. The public service duty is to ensure that risk interventions and safety outcomes apply equitably to all. 
From the Editor's Desk: Don’t Look Up
No full textThe Academy Award-nominated movie Don’t Look Up is about a group of astronomers who discover a comet on a collision course with Earth. The scientists determine the impending event will destroy all life on the planet and report this finding to the proper authorities, including the President. Yet most of the authorities and the media remain indifferent to this information.
I have discussed this film with people who work in system safety and risk management, and have found that some are reminded of events that have actually happened. Of course, these actual experiences did not involve events quite as serious as a comet collision with Earth, but they were serious potential events with clear mechanisms of occurrence. The variability of reactions of people to potentially high-risk events is an interesting area of research that I hope International System Safety Society (ISSS) members will pursue in the future
A Comparison of Incident Investigation Outcomes and Safety Recommendations between Clinical Safety and AcciMap Experts
Get PDFThis paper focuses on the perception of Branford’s standardized AcciMap approach as a tool for accident analysis in healthcare. This study further builds on the previous work regarding National Health Service (NHSScotland) clinical safety practitioners’ first-time experience in applying the standardized AcciMap approach, and discusses its advantages and limitations [Ref. 1]. A series of training sessions were carried out with a clinical domain expert from the National Services Scotland (NSS) to apply the standardized AcciMap approach for health information technology (IT) analysis. The AcciMap method was used to analyze a medication error incident involving the computerized provider order entry (CPOE) system [Ref. 2] by Clinical and AcciMap experts. Outcomes and safety recommendations from both participants were then qualitatively compared and discussed to gain further insight into applying the AcciMap method