Assuring Safety and Security

Large technological systems produce new capabilities that allow innovative solutions to social, engineering and environmental problems. This trend is especially important in the safety-critical systems (SCS) domain where we simultaneously aim to do more with the systems whilst reducing the harm they might cause. Even with the increased uncertainty created by these opportunities, SCS still need to be assured against safety and security risk and, in many cases, certified before use. A large number of approaches and standards have emerged, however there remain challenges related to technical risk such as identifying inter-domain risk interactions, developing safety-security causal models, and understanding the impact of new risk information. In addition, there are socio-technical challenges that undermine technical risk activities and act as a barrier to co-assurance, these include insufficient processes for risk acceptance, unclear responsibilities, and a lack of legal, regulatory and organisational structure to support safety-security alignment. A new approach is required. The Safety-Security Assurance Framework (SSAF) is proposed here as a candidate solution. SSAF is based on the new paradigm of independent co-assurance, that is, keeping the disciplines separate but having synchronisation points where required information is exchanged. SSAF is comprised of three parts - the Conceptual Model defines the underlying philosophy, and the Technical Risk Model (TRM) and Socio-Technical Model (STM) consist of processes and models for technical risk and socio-technical aspects of co-assurance. Findings from a partial evaluation of SSAF using case studies reveal that the approach has some utility in creating inter-domain relationship models and identifying socio-technical gaps for co-assurance. The original contribution to knowledge presented in this thesis is the novel approach to co-assurance that uses synchronisation points, explicit representation of a technical risk argument that argues over interaction risks, and a confidence argument that explicitly considers co-assurance socio-technical factors

Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Production Systems and Logistics (CPSL 2021)

Proceedings of the CPSL 202

Rhythms of information infrastructure cultivation: the case of e-Mobility in Berlin

This thesis investigates the importance of temporal rhythms in the study of information infrastructures (IIs), responding to the call to address an II’s “biography” by focusing on its evolution over time. It enriches understanding of how socially constructed rhythms, a temporal structure under-examined in the II literature, influence II cultivation. A strategic niche project to develop an e-mobility II in Berlin is used as the case study and reveals the influence of rhythm in disciplining (constraining) and modeling (motivating) II cultivation. It demonstrates how the intermediary may mediate these influences through the interventions of harmonising, riffing and composing. Based on these interventions, the study develops the concept of facilitated II cultivation, which adds to the emergent literature exploring the tension between planned and emergent infrastructure work. In doing so, the study presents a framework that helps combine short-term implementation concerns (strategic interventions by the intermediary) with long-term path dependency and evolutionary concerns (influences of past and future temporal rhythms) for IIs

Road space allocation: the intersection of transport planning, governance and infrastructure

Contemporary professional transport planning and policy continue to focus on resolving the car’s place in contemporary urban society. Transport planners really only have two viable alternatives when engaging car-specific concerns: constructing more road space or allocating existing road space to give specific modes priority and/or to reduce travel. The second alternative drives the research programme for this thesis. For reasons made clear in this thesis, turning to transport-specific bodies of scholarly literature fails to provide a useful starting point to understand road space allocation. This research is therefore situated within a ‘mobilities paradigm’ (Urry, 2008). The mobilities paradigm provides a heterogeneous view of the world in which to view what is referred in this thesis as the scientific world of transport planning. This opens up useful exploratory lines of inquiry to understand the ways in which the work of transport planners (i.e. animate) allocating road space (i.e. inanimate) is constrained and constituted. This helps reveal limitations of governance, policy frameworks and professional knowledge in allocating road space. Insight from the sociology of scientific knowledge is used to analyse road space allocation from historical and contemporary settings, and to incorporate materiality into analysis. Utilising a case study methodology, this study critically examines road space allocation in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Data is drawn upon from a critical examination of scholarly literature, a document analysis of archival materials and government policy and legislative materials, face-to-face interviews with over 60 practicing and retired transport planners and participant observation of a transport planning exercise. The findings of this research suggest that though traditional aspects such as politics and legislative mandate do constrain and limit the action and reach of professionals, professionals were found to make and enact normative decisions that resulted in re-imagining road space as more than the site of car travel. Resolving several tensions identified in the thesis which make allocating road space challenging resulted in professionals embodying knowledge and experience reflective of adopting a demand management stance. This stance continues to be advanced by scholars as crucial to destabilising the car’s place in contemporary urban society. However, momentum needed to entrench the demand stance at institutional levels is found to be constrained by cyclical and/or alternating mobility visions generated from constant change in state government in Victoria. Drawing insight from sociology of scientific knowledge has therefore been found to provide for a new and enhanced frame to look at issues related to transport planning, road space allocation and the role of different agents (e.g. actors and infrastructure). Developing new professional knowledge and practices critical to engraining a demand management stance in practice is shown to be informed and enacted through practitioners actively engaging, and/or reacting to and against, technology and infrastructure. This confirms and reinforces the usefulness of tracing the contours of materiality, and in so doing, provides for an improved and more realistic picture of professional transport planning practice. Findings drawn from this thesis therefore advance our current understanding of how professional transport planning practice is constrained and constituted

An Investigation to Evaluate the Feasibility of an Intermodal Freight Transport System.

The threat of greenhouse gases and the resulting climate change have been causing concern at international levels. This has led towards new sustainable policies towards reducing the anthropogenic effects on the environment and the population through promoting sustainable solutions for the freight industry. The research was prompted by the growing concerns that were no mode-choice tool to select as an alternative to road freight transport. There were growing concerns that a large percentage of transport related negativities, related various costs and pollution costs, losses arising from traffic accidents, delay costs from congestion and abatement costs due to climate impacts of transport, etc., were not being borne by the user. Economists have defined them as external costs. Internalising these external costs has been regarded as an efficient way to share the transport related costs. The aim of this research was to construct a freight mode choice model, based on total transport costs, as a mode choice substitution tool. This model would allow the feasibility of choosing alternative intermodal system to a primarily ‘road system’. The thesis postulates a novel model in computing total freight transport costs incurred during the total transit of goods along three North European transport corridors. The model evaluated the total costs summing the internal, external and time costs for varied mode choices from unimodal and the second level of intermodal transport systems. The research outcomes have shown the influences of total costs on the shipper and the preferred mode choices from the available mode/route options with sustainable transport solutions. The impacts of such alternatives were evaluated in this research. This will allow the embedding of intermodal infrastructures as sustainable and alternative mode choices for the freight industry

Deadly Discourse: Negotiating Bureaucratic Consensus for the Final Solution through Organizational and Technical Communication

The Final Solution was largely accomplished in eleven months; its executors, the Nazi SS, faced the constant problem that as killing and plunder escalated so did internal competition and corruption; and the SS deliberately cultivated an intensely competitive and polycratic organizational culture that fit the Nazi worldview of life-as-struggle. By tying these three observations together—that the Final Solution was punctuated, entropic, and polycratic—the problem arises: How did SS organizational communications manage, just barely long enough, to create a temporary social reality that regulated the internal contradictions of its genocidal project and fragmented bureaucracy? This study contends that through its organizational and technical communication—the outwardly normal and communally validated regime of formatted documents, official stationery, preprinted forms, filing codes, organizational nomenclature, and bureaucratic catchphrases—competing SS personnel found a common frame of reference to socially construct rules for temporary cooperation. Thus, their documents became boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Wilson & Herndl, 2007) which bridged competing organizational interests within the rhetorical community (Miller, 1994) of desk-murderers. To explore this thesis an evidentiary sample of surviving documents is selected from a single but representative SS bureau, the Security Police (Sipo) Technical Matters Group that administered the mobile gas van program. The documents are analyzed according to Longo\u27s (1998) cultural research methodology for technical writing in which texts are examined in their historical and cultural contexts and then analyzed as discourse, followed by an interrogation of how the texts have been ordered by their analysts for purposes of study and the analysts\u27 relationships to the text. The organization of this project follows this methodology as Chapter 1 introduces the problem; Chapter 2 provides an historical narrative of the gas van program and its antecedents; Chapter 3 reviews the integrative aspects of the Group members\u27 national and institutional cultures, and the differentiating aspects of their organizational culture and its various subcultures; Chapter 4 describes the biographies and postwar testimonies of the Group\u27s principal actors; Chapter 5 introduces and describes the documents themselves; Chapter 6 offers an analysis, grounded in Miller\u27s (1994) concept of the rhetorical community, of the documents\u27 textual and visual rhetorics; Chapter 7 provides a discourse analysis of Group members\u27 use of linguistic resources; Chapter 8 explores various postwar orderings of the lengthiest and most notorious of the gas van texts, prior to and including Katz\u27s (1992a) introduction of the document into the technical communication literature; Chapter 9 interrogates how subsequent analysts within the discipline have ordered the text and what this may reveal about their relationships to it; and Chapter 10 elaborates possible implications for communication ethics. The research problem is answered with the claim that, rather than understanding the Final Solution only as the operation in extremis of Weberian bureaucratic rationality, the desk-murderers may be viewed as a rhetorical community that held chaos at bay through boundary objects—their documents—that deployed metaphors, narratives, and genres onto which competing interests could project their own interpretations while constructing temporary spaces of cooperation

Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World

The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management - mathematical methods in reliability and safety - risk assessment - risk management - system reliability - uncertainty analysis - digitalization and big data - prognostics and system health management - occupational safety - accident and incident modeling - maintenance modeling and applications - simulation for safety and reliability analysis - dynamic risk and barrier management - organizational factors and safety culture - human factors and human reliability - resilience engineering - structural reliability - natural hazards - security - economic analysis in risk managemen