An agent-based approach for structured modeling, analysis and improvement of safety culture

Abstract

Safety culture is broadly recognized as important for operational safety in various fields, including air traffic management, power plant control and health care. Previous studies addressed characterization and assessment of safety culture extensively. Nevertheless, relations between safety culture and formal and informal organizational structures and processes are yet not well understood. To address this gap, a new, formal, agent-based approach is proposed. This paper shows the application of the approach to an air navigation service provider, including structured modeling, analysis and identification of improvement strategies for the organizational safety culture. The model results have been validated using safety culture data that had been achieved by an independent safety culture survey study.Keywords Safety culture · Agent-based organizational modeling · Social simulation · Model analysis · Model validation This contribution is based on a published conference paper (Sharpanskykh and Stroeve 2010), which was extended and revised significantly. There exists a companion paper (Stroeve et al. 2011) targeted to a safety science audience, which focuses on coupling of the obtained model results with results of a survey-based study and on validation. Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article

Understanding the Sociocognitive Process of Construction Workers’ Unsafe Behaviors: An Agent-Based Modeling Approach

“…The ABM method has gradually been applied to the field of construction safety management. Sharpanskykh and Stroeve [62] proposed a new, formal, agent-based approach to study the relations between safety culture and formal and informal organizational structures and processes. Choi et al [39] used an ABM method to study management norms, workgroup norms, and the relationship between security attitudes and unsafe behavior.…”

Formal and computational modeling of anticipation mechanisms of resilience in the complex sociotechnical air transport system

“…TTL has proven to be a suitable formal language for the specification of agent-based models of complex sociotechnical systems (Bosse et al 2009;Sharpanskykh and Stroeve 2011;Sharpanskykh 2011). TTL is a variant of an order-sorted predicate logic (Manzano and Manzano 1996).…”

A hybrid simulation approach for integrating safety behavior into construction planning: An earthmoving case study

“…The SD models illustrated safety management theories based on major accidents. The agent-oriented SD model (Feola et al, 2012) and ABS (Sharpanskykh and Stroeve, 2011) were more practical and were focused on evaluation of safety interventions. A detailed review of the six papers can be found in (Goh and Palak, 2014).…”

“…The factorial experiment is meant to guide managers in identifying impactful interventions and the interactions between factors (or controllable variables). Despite its importance, none of the six safety simulation papers reviewed (Rudolph and Repenning, 2002;Cooke, 2003;Cooke and Rohleder, 2006;Salge and Milling, 2006;Sharpanskykh and Stroeve, 2011;Feola et al, 2012) conducted factorial experiments. A 2 k factorial design is performed herein to encourage its usage when utilizing the proposed framework.…”