A new approach to prevent accidents in the steel industry

The steel industry has faced extraordinary changes over recent years incorporating new technologies and processes to make it more competitive and safer based on market requirements, regulations, and community concerns. Safety, in particular, has been an important topic in which the industry has put remarkable efforts to improve its performance. Traditional safety models currently used to analyze and prevent accidents have been in use for decades. However, the complexity of systems has substantially increased over this time and has reshaped the way people perform their activities. The limitations of traditional models are becoming more evident as system complexity increases, especially when it comes to understanding the interactions between many system elements, incomplete or otherwise flawed requirements, design errors, and human behavior and contextual factors. Today, there is general recognition that a new approach is needed to address the complexity of modern systems and to address the deeper systemic causes that are leading to accidents. This thesis evaluates and demonstrates how new approaches based on Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes (STAMP) can be applied using a real case from the steel industry. Using these approaches, organizations can gain a broader perspective to understand the full range of factors contributing to accidents and create more effective measures to prevent future accidents.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• López De la Toba, Paulo Francisco.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• John P. Thomas.

• Engineering Systems Division.
• System Design and Management Program.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/145232

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/145232