Abstract
Current approaches to risk management place insufficient emphasis on the system knowledge available to the assessor, particularly in respect of the dynamic behavior of the system under threat, the role of human agents (HAs), and the knowledge available to those agents. In this article, we address the second of these issues. We are concerned with a class of systems containing HAs playing a variety of roles as significant system elements-as decisionmakers, cognitive agents, or implementers-that is, human activity systems. Within this family of HAS, we focus on safety and mission-critical systems, referring to this subclass as critical human activity systems (CHASs). Identification of the role and contribution of these human elements to a system is a nontrivial problem whether in an engineering context, or, as is the case here, in a wider social and public context. Frequently, they are treated as standing apart from the system in design or policy terms. Regardless of the process of policy definition followed, analysis of the risk and threats to such a CHAS requires a holistic approach, since the effect of undesirable, uninformed, or erroneous actions on the part of the human elements is both potentially significant to the system output and inextricably bound together with the nonhuman elements of the system. We present a procedure for identifying the potential threats and risks emerging from the roles and activity of those HAs, using the 2014 flooding in southwestern England and the Thames Valley as a contemporary example.
Highlights
This is the second of a series of articles[1,2,3] concerned with the identification and assessment of system risk as part of the process of identifying appropriate policies for the control and mitigation of risks under inevitably limited resource availability.[4]. The focus is on safety and mission-critical systems, those that contain human agents (HAs) whose decisions and actions form an inextricable part of the system assets, but noncritical systems benefit potentially from our approach
We concentrate on the second of these points, deploying a technique well known in more general strategic analysis and emerging from the system dynamics community, to assist in the identification of risk mechanisms in a way that explicitly includes the involvement and actions of individuals and groups inhabiting and associated with the system in focus
The various roles of the HAs associated with a critical human activity systems (CHASs) can be characterized by three distinguishing factors: [1] passivity, the extent to which they are active or passive in their role; [2] autonomy, the degree of autonomy that they possess in their interactions with the system; and [3] abstraction, being the extent to which they are acting in the domain of the intangible or the physical
Summary
This is the second of a series of articles[1,2,3] concerned with the identification and assessment of system risk as part of the process of identifying appropriate policies for the control and mitigation of risks under inevitably limited resource availability.[4] The focus is on safety and mission-critical systems, those that contain human agents (HAs) whose decisions and actions form an inextricable part of the system assets, but noncritical systems benefit potentially from our approach. We model the flood events of the 2013/2014 Somerset Levels in southwest England, using a modeling architecture that covers the physical infrasystem, the social valuation context, and the policy surround.[1]
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