Managing and measuring risk in technological systems

Safety Management is intended to create order out of disorder, to reduce the "information entropy", for the purpose of improved safety. Our purpose here and now is to try to introduce some predictability and insight into the risk or occurrence of apparently random events, where a general risk prediction we adopt a fundamental must be testable against the world's existing data. The risk management issues are clear, given the classic features of major human involvement and contribution to accidents, errors and outcomes occurring with modern technological systems. Prior incidents and prior knowledge and experience must be fully incorporated or learned from. If we do not know where we are on the learning curve, we also do not know the probability of such an event, and we have no objective measure of the "safety culture". Emphasis on defining and finding so-called "lack of safety culture" has resulted in an extensive and detailed study of the safety management and process safety of many global corporations. We utilize the concepts adopted in thermodynamics and Information Theory to establish the information entropy as a finite, physically based and useful measure of risk in technological systems. The results that we demonstrate show that the risk is dynamic, and can be utilized for management and predictive risk analysis purposes.