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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Unsupervised Machine Learning For Pattern Identification In Occupational Accidents, Fatemeh Davoudi Kakhki, Steven Freeman, Gretchen Mosher Feb 2022

Unsupervised Machine Learning For Pattern Identification In Occupational Accidents, Fatemeh Davoudi Kakhki, Steven Freeman, Gretchen Mosher

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Creating safe work environment is significant in saving workers’ lives, improving corporates’ social responsibility and sustainable development. Pattern identification in occupational accidents is vital in elaborating efficient safety counter-measures aiming at improving prevention and mitigating outcomes of future incidents. The objective of this study is to identify patterns related to the occurrence of occupational accidents in non-farm agricultural work environments based on workers’ compensation claims data, using latent class clustering method as an un-supervised machine learning modeling approach. The result showed injury profiles and incident dynamics have low, average, and high levels of risks based on the main causes and …


Use Of Neural Networks To Identify Safety Prevention Priorities In Agro-Manufacturing Operations Within Commercial Grain Elevators, Fatemeh Davoudi Kakhki, Steven Freeman, Gretchen Mosher Nov 2019

Use Of Neural Networks To Identify Safety Prevention Priorities In Agro-Manufacturing Operations Within Commercial Grain Elevators, Fatemeh Davoudi Kakhki, Steven Freeman, Gretchen Mosher

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

The grain handling industry plays a significant role in U.S. agriculture by storing, distributing, and processing a variety of agricultural commodities. Commercial grain elevators are hazardous agro-manufacturing work environments where workers are prone to severe injuries, due to the nature of the activities and workplace. Safety incidents in agro-manufacturing operations generally arise from a combination of factors, rather than a single cause, therefore, research on occupational incidents must look deeper into identifying the underlying causes, through the application of advanced analyses methods. In occupational safety, it is possible to estimate and predict probability of safety risks through developing artificial neural …


Examining Accident Reports Involving Autonomous Vehicles In California, Francesca Favaro, Nazanin Nader, Sky Eurich, Michelle Tripp, Naresh Varadaraju Sep 2017

Examining Accident Reports Involving Autonomous Vehicles In California, Francesca Favaro, Nazanin Nader, Sky Eurich, Michelle Tripp, Naresh Varadaraju

Faculty Publications

Autonomous Vehicle technology is quickly expanding its market and has found in Silicon Valley, California, a strong foothold for preliminary testing on public roads. In an effort to promote safety and transparency to consumers, the California Department of Motor Vehicles has mandated that reports of accidents involving autonomous vehicles be drafted and made available to the public. The present work shows an in-depth analysis of the accident reports filed by different manufacturers that are testing autonomous vehicles in California (testing data from September 2014 to March 2017). The data provides important information on autonomous vehicles accidents’ dynamics, related to the …


Toward Risk Assessment 2.0: Safety Supervisory Control And Model-Based Hazard Monitoring For Risk-Informed Safety Interventions, Francesca Favaro, Joseph Saleh Aug 2016

Toward Risk Assessment 2.0: Safety Supervisory Control And Model-Based Hazard Monitoring For Risk-Informed Safety Interventions, Francesca Favaro, Joseph Saleh

Faculty Publications

Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) is a staple in the engineering risk community, and it has become to some extent synonymous with the entire quantitative risk assessment undertaking. Limitations of PRA continue to occupy researchers, and workarounds are often proposed. After a brief review of this literature, we propose to address some of PRA׳s limitations by developing a novel framework and analytical tools for model-based system safety, or safety supervisory control, to guide safety interventions and support a dynamic approach to risk assessment and accident prevention. Our work shifts the emphasis from the pervading probabilistic mindset in risk assessment toward the …


Temporal Logic For System Safety Properties And Hazard Monitoring, Francesca Favaro, J. Saleh Jan 2016

Temporal Logic For System Safety Properties And Hazard Monitoring, Francesca Favaro, J. Saleh

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Software In Military Aviation And Drone Mishaps: Analysis And Recommendations For The Investigation Process, Veronica Foreman, Francesca Favaro, Joseph Saleh, Christopher Johnson May 2015

Software In Military Aviation And Drone Mishaps: Analysis And Recommendations For The Investigation Process, Veronica Foreman, Francesca Favaro, Joseph Saleh, Christopher Johnson

Faculty Publications

Software plays a central role in military systems. It is also an important factor in many recent incidents and accidents. A safety gap is growing between our software-intensive technological capabilities and our understanding of the ways they can fail or lead to accidents. Traditional forms of accident investigation are poorly equipped to trace the sources of software failure, for instance software does not age in the same way that hardware components fail over time. As such, it can be hard to trace the causes of software failure or mechanisms by which it contributed to accidents back into the development and …


Observability-In-Depth: An Essential Complement To The Defense-In-Depth Safety Strategy In The Nuclear Industry, Francesca Favaro, Joseph Saleh Dec 2014

Observability-In-Depth: An Essential Complement To The Defense-In-Depth Safety Strategy In The Nuclear Industry, Francesca Favaro, Joseph Saleh

Faculty Publications

Defense-in-depth is a fundamental safety principle for the design and operation of nuclear power plants. Despite its general appeal, defense-in-depth is not without its drawbacks, which include its potential for concealing the occurrence of hazardous states in a system, and more generally rendering the latter more opaque for its operators and managers, thus resulting in safety blind spots. This in turn translates into a shrinking of the time window available for operators to identify an unfolding hazardous condition or situation and intervene to abate it. To prevent this drawback from materializing, we propose in this work a novel safety principle …


Towards The Development Of The Observability-In-Depth Safety Principle In The Nuclear Industry, Francesca Favaro, Joseph Saleh Jun 2014

Towards The Development Of The Observability-In-Depth Safety Principle In The Nuclear Industry, Francesca Favaro, Joseph Saleh

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


System Safety Principles: A Multidisciplinary Engineering Perspective, Joseph Saleh, Karen Marais, Francesca Favaro May 2014

System Safety Principles: A Multidisciplinary Engineering Perspective, Joseph Saleh, Karen Marais, Francesca Favaro

Faculty Publications

System safety is of particular importance for many industries. Broadly speaking, it refers to the state or objective of striving to sustainably ensure accident prevention through actions on multiple safety levers (technical, organizational, and regulatory). While complementary to risk analysis, it is distinct in one important way: risk analysis is anticipatory rationality examining the possibility of adverse events (or accident scenarios), and the tools of risk analysis support and in some cases quantify various aspects of this analysis effort. The end-objective of risk analysis is to help identify and prioritize risks, inform risk management, and support risk communication. These tools …


Analysis Of Software Contributions To Military Aviation And Drone Mishaps, Veronica Foreman, Francesca Favaro, Joseph Saleh Jan 2014

Analysis Of Software Contributions To Military Aviation And Drone Mishaps, Veronica Foreman, Francesca Favaro, Joseph Saleh

Faculty Publications

Software is assuming an increasing role in the aerospace industry, and by the same token it is also playing an increasing role in many recent incidents and accidents of both military and commercial vehicles. To better understand this role, we examine two case studies from the accident database of the Air Force Accident Investigation Board (AIB). We previously illustrated the limitations of the notion of “software failure” and developed, in its stead, the notion of software contribution to adverse events. We show here how specific operational scenarios, generally unconsidered during the software development and testing, trigger those contributions. We provide …


On The Primitives Of Causality: From The Semantics Of Agonist And Antagonist To Models Of Accident Causation And System Safety, Loïc Brevault, Francesca Favaro, Joseph Saleh Sep 2013

On The Primitives Of Causality: From The Semantics Of Agonist And Antagonist To Models Of Accident Causation And System Safety, Loïc Brevault, Francesca Favaro, Joseph Saleh

Faculty Publications

Controversial discussions on causality have been present in ancient philosophy since the days of Aristotle. Despite the use of this concept in numerous subjects, there is no consensus on the definition of causality and its possible mathematization. Many authors have analyzed the relation between causes and effects; the predominant school of thought reduces causation to a physical relation (either deterministic or probabilistic) between two events. The distinction between causes and consequences is not always clear and meaningful as different “layers of understanding” may be applied to the notion of causality. From this point of view the cause-effect implication relation can …