About the ESReDA Foresight in Safety Project Group

BACKGROUND ◊  GOALS  ◊  DURATION  ◊  DELIVERABLES  ◊  PARTICIPATING OGANISATIONS  ◊  MINERVA COMMUNITIES

◊ !!! 53rd ESReDA SEMINAR !!! ◊

BACKGROUND

To avoid occurrence of events (accidents, incidents or crises), prevention is often seen as the main, not to say the only, goal of (industrial or system) safety.

Since the nineties, 3 ESReDA’s working/project groups have obtained results regarding improvement of safety thanks to learning from experience (e.g. accident database, accident investigation; dynamic learning as a follow-up from accident investigation). They especially:Gave overview of accident investigation practices, institutions and regulatory framework in Europe;

• Gave overview of accident investigation practices, institutions and regulatory framework in Europe;
• Gave guidance of principles for how to conduct accident investigations and design event and accident databases;
• Gave guidance for dimensions to be taken into account for dynamic learning after an event;
• Provided some requirements for designers of training in the domain of accident investigation and learning;
• Gave overview of the main barriers to learning from events.

This work has been documented through different publications (books, reports, guidelines, publications, ESReDA seminar proceedings), some freely available on the ESReDA website and others that are mainly available at ESReDA editor (DNV library).

Some results of these previous works showed that, before event happened, there were early warning signs (EWS) that could have, to some extent, provided useful information and to some extent been "relevant tools" for preventing events occurrence.

GOALS

Goals of the Project Group “Foresight in Safety” are:

• To better define these EWS (e.g. weak signals, precursors, near misses …);
• To focus on the human and organizational mechanisms for their treatment (e.g. role of whistle-blowers, role of learning, enabling features of organizational culture and concepts such as mindfulness, chronic unease).

To fulfil these goals the Project Group aims will try to identify how to:

• Enable organizations to deal with unexpected situations, situations not described by rules and procedures;
• Link them with vulnerabilities reliability and resilience of organizations;
• Characterize contrast between and change from apathetic to foresighted approach;
• Apply a systems perspective regarding life cycle analysis (from design to operations and further) including the synergy between feedback and feed-forward controls;
• Address the need for collaboration between technological and sociological disciplines;
• Articulate them with monitoring of Safety Performance (e.g. KPIs, SPIs ...);
• Make them visible in Data Bases treatment;
• See interest of use of scenario techniques and simulation underlying dangerous operations;
• ...

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DURATION

Expected duration of the Project Group is 2 to 3 years. The Project Group was launched in September 2015 after a kick-off meeting in Paris at EDF R&D and IRSN. The PG had two meetings in 2016 at EC Joint Research Center in Ispra and Petten and will have two meetings in 2017 in Czech Republic and at JRC in Ispra in relation with the ESReDA 53rd Seminar, scheduled 14th and 15th of November.

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DELIVERABLES

Work of the Project Group will be made visible through a deliverable, including articles tackling issues listed above and through organisation of the 53rd Seminar on “Enhancing Safety: the Challenge of Foresight”.

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PARTICIPATING ORGANISATIONS