A hybrid technique for organizational safety risk analysis

Increasing interest over the past two decades in modelling of organizational safety behaviour is in part motivated by the desire to understand the deeper more fundamental causes of accidents and incidents. There have been significant improvements over the past two decades in the sophistication of quantitative methods of safety and risk assessment, but there have not been adequate discussions on adapting the best techniques suitable for organizational safety risk frameworks. A methodology of adapting the appropriate techniques and creating a "hybrid" approach is discussed in this paper. Ingredients are taken from techniques in Risk Assessment, Human Reliability, Social and Behavioural Science, Business Process Modeling, and Dynamic Modeling. Then, an example of the proposed hybrid modelling environment including an integration of System Dynamics (SD), Bayesian Belief Network (BBN), Event Sequence Diagram (ESD), and Fault Tree (FT), is provided in order to demonstrate the feasibility and value of hybrid frameworks. The hybrid technique presented here combines "deterministic" and "probabilistic" modelling perspectives, and provides a flexible risk management tool for socio-technical systems.