Risk management in a Dynamic Society: A Modeling Problem

The paper present a modeling problem related to industrial risk management within large-scale hazardous installations in a modern, dynamic society. The socio-technical system involved in risk management includes several levels ranging from legislators, managers,work planners, and operators. This system is presently stressed by a fast pace of technological change, by an increasingly aggressive, competitive environment, and by changing regulatory practices and public pressure.Traditionally, each level of this is studied separately by a particular academic discipline, and modeling is done by generalizing across systems and their particular hazard sources. It is argued that risk management must be modeled by cross-disciplinary studies, considering risk management to be a control problem and serving to represent the control structure involving all levels of society for each particular hazard category.It is argued that this requires a system oriented approach based on functional abstraction rather than structural decomposition. Therefore, task analysis focused on action sequences and occasional deviation in terms of human errors should be replaced by a model of behavior shaping mechanisms in terms of work system constraints, boundaries of acceptable performance,and subjective criteria guiding adaptation to change. It is found that at present a convergence of research paradigms of human sciences guided by cognitive science concepts supports this approach.