AN ENTERPRISE ENGINEERING APPROACH TO SAFETY MANAGEMENT

Abstract

Significant accidents are often related to the performance of a complex socio-technical system (enterprise) involving technology, people, organizations, processes, management and legislation.

Approaches to identify factors that lead to accidents and then take them into account during the design, operation, maintenance and evolution of the socio-technical system (enterprise) are not well defined and not consistently utilized in practice.

The emerging discipline of "enterprise engineering" provides an opportunity to apply an engineering approach to the design, operation, maintenance and evolution of enterprises to improve the likelihood of the enterprise achieving and maintaining its safety goals.

The integration of design principles and approaches from the fields of systems engineering, safety engineering, management science and enterprise architecture into a Safety Enterprise Engineering (SEE) approach based on a consistent model of the enterprise provides the basis of the approach described in this thesis.

A general process model for applying an enterprise engineering approach to safety management is defined. Design principles from nuclear industry best practice documents are identified and mapped to the general process model.

The Fukushima nuclear accident that occurred in 2011 was used to identify weaknesses in current practices in the nuclear industry. These weaknesses were compared with best practices, as defined by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) documents, to identify the subset of weaknesses identified from the Fukushima accident that are also weaknesses within the IAEA set of best practices. The Safety Enterprise Engineering approach was applied to a slice of safety related functionality of a CANDU nuclear utility to demonstrate the degree to which the SEE approach overcomes weaknesses of both current practice and best practice within the nuclear industry.