Applying System Thinking to Learn from Accident of Modern Automatic Control Systems

Modern societies increasingly rely on auto- matic control systems. These systems are hardly pure tech-nical systems; instead they are complex socio-technical sys- tems, which consist of technical elements and social components. It is necessary to have a systematic approach to analyze these systems b...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:电子学报：英文版 2014-04, Vol.23 (2), p.409-414
Main Author: NIU Ru CAO Yuan GE Xiaocheng TANG Tao
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
互连网络
列车控制系统
反馈信息
复杂社会技术系统
技术要素
组成部分
自动化控制系统
铁路事故
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Modern societies increasingly rely on auto- matic control systems. These systems are hardly pure tech-nical systems; instead they are complex socio-technical sys- tems, which consist of technical elements and social components. It is necessary to have a systematic approach to analyze these systems because it is growing evidence that accidents from these systems usually have complex causal factors which form an interconnected network of events, rather than a simple cause-effect chain. We take railway Train control systems （TCS） as an example to demonstrate the importance of the socio-technical approach to analyze the system. The paper presents an investigation of recent high-speed railway accident by applying STAMP - one of the most notable socio-technical system analysis tech- niques, outlines improvements to the system which could avoid similar accidents in the future. We also provide our valuable feedback for the use of STAMP.
ISSN:1022-4653