The Need for New Paradigms in Safety Engineering

The world and technology are changing, but these changes are not reflected in our safety engineering approaches. Many of the underlying assumptions of the traditional techniques no longer hold for the complex, high-tech systems being built today. We need new models of accident causality and engineering techniques built on them that handle these new systems and problems. An example of a new model, based on systems theory rather than reliability theory, is described and some uses of such a model are discussed.

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