Safety Science 69 (2014) 1–2

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Safety Science

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Guest Editorial

Special issue of selected articles from PSAM 11 – ESREL 2012

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2014.06.0090925-7535/� 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

ESREL 2012 – PSAM11 conference was held in Helsinki, Finland25–29 June 2012. The conference was jointly organized by theEuropean Safety and Reliability Association (ESRA) and the Interna-tional Association of Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Manage-ment (IAPSAM).

The 2012 conference program was a blend of ESREL – PSAM tra-ditions and Nordic Footprints in the safety and reliability fields.The technical program included papers addressing all of the majorareas of reliability and risk analysis methods and applications,including nuclear, process and chemical industries, offshore andmarine, space and aviation, civil engineering, information technol-ogy, medical technology. In addition a considerable number of spe-cial sessions were organized covering issues such as ‘ImpreciseProbabilities’, ‘Passive Safety Systems’ and the ‘Fukushima Acci-dent’. The technical program included 760 papers from authorscoming from all over the world, selected from about 1000 submit-ted abstracts and reviewed by members of the Technical ProgramCommittee for the conference. This special issue contains a collec-tion of extended versions of selected papers presented at the ESREL2012 – PSAM11 conference.

A total of twelve papers was selected within the conferencefinal program and invited as potential candidates for extensionand submission to the Safety Science journal. Suggestions forpotential papers were submitted by the track leaders and a finaldecision was made by the quest editors based on the proposedpaper’s suitability to the journal scope and its quality. After review,seven papers were accepted for publication. Although these papersdo not give an exhaustive overview of all the type of the works pre-sented at the ESREL 2012 – PSAM 11 conference, they should pro-vide a picture of some of the typical issues discussed during theconference.

Wahlström and Rollenhagen, in their paper, investigateapproaches for modelling management systems and safety man-agement. They apply a control metaphor for understanding systembehaviour and investigate how the concepts of control theoryrelate to safety management. Based on a conceptual analysis, theypropose that successful control relies on four necessary conditions:a system model, observability, controllability and a preferencefunction. They suggest that polycentric control and the consider-ation of safe and unsafe regions in a state space may provide usefulways forward in safety management.

Merad, Dechy and Marcel study the way of achieving high levelsof sustainability in organizations. They propose a ‘‘proactive-basedassessment’’ designed to measure an organisation’s ability to gov-ern and achieve sustainability. Their proposed assessment method

relies on three new concepts: ‘‘critical capital’’; Highly SustainableOrganisation (HSO), and learning stages within an HSO. Their paperbuilds on work on the elaboration of standard for the public Frenchsector on the field of governance and sustainability for publicorganisations. Merad, Dechy and Marcel suggest that organisa-tional sustainability is the ability of the system to preserve andto maintain, within the time, a critical capital and to adapt to itsecosystem. Accordingly, a loss of organisational sustainability indi-cate whether the organisation is prone to shift to an undesirableorganisational state that would decrease the ability or even ceaseto provide services to the ecosystem and to maintain its identity.

Fruhen, Mearns, Flin and Kirwan study senior managers’ safetycommitment. They are especially interested in the characteristicsthat underpin senior managers’ ability to engage in behaviours thatdemonstrate safety commitment. Their empirical study investi-gates the relationships of problem solving, social competence andsafety knowledge with senior manager’s capability to demonstratesafety commitment. The interview study consisted of 60 seniormanagers from 11 Air Navigation Service Providers. Their resultssuggest that problem-solving ability as well as social competencewere related to demonstrations of safety commitment. However,safety knowledge was not associated with behaviours that demon-strate safety commitment. The authors propose that training andguidance designed for senior managers should focus on their prob-lem-solving abilities and perception of others in order to supportthem in demonstrating safety commitment.

Morrow, Koves and Barnes investigated the factors that com-prise the concept of safety culture in the nuclear power industryand evaluated the relationships between these safety culture fac-tors and other measures of organizational and safety performance.They show in their empirical questionnaire study of 2876responses from 63 nuclear power plant sites from the USA statisti-cally significant concurrent and predictive relationships betweensafety culture, as measured by the survey, and multiple nuclearpower plant performance indicators. The results suggest that thatsafety culture is correlated with concurrent measures of safety per-formance and may be related to future performance for somemeasures.

Ale, van Gulijk, A. Hanea, D. Hanea, Hudson, Lin and Sillemstudy concepts for the development of a dynamic risk managementsupport tool for the oil industry based on Bayesian Belief Networks(BBNs). This method aims at enhancing the methodologies cur-rently employed by the industry, and in particular allows the eval-uation of the present and future vulnerabilities to catastrophicevents. It also allows the evaluation of the potential effect of

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actions – by management or by authorities – on these vulnerabil-ities. The approach is based on the CATS model for commercial avi-ation safety. The work is motivated by the recent disasters wherethe causes range from direct technical failures through organiza-tional shortcomings right up to weak regulation and inappropriatecompany cultures.

Aneziris, Papazoglou, Mud, Damen, Bellamy and Oh present anddiscuss a method and its results for quantifying occupational riskowing to falling objects. The method is based on the principles ofquantified risk assessment, using five logical models representingfalling object situations: (a) working or being near cranes, (b)working or being near mechanical lifting devices, (c) working orbeing near person propelled vehicles (d) manual handling of loadsand (e) working or being near falling objects (various other cases).These models allow the delineation of accidents involving contactwith falling objects, into sequences of events describing measures(engineered and/or procedural) in place to prevent a struck by fall-ing objects or to mitigate the consequences. Identification of thesesequences enables the identification of specific root causes of suchaccidents and hence the determination of specific and practical

actions that can influence the probability of being hit or the sever-ity of the consequences. A sensitivity analysis has been performed,assessing the relative importance of measures affecting workingconditions and eventually risk.

Moorkamp, Kramer, van Gulijk and Ale reflect on the applicabil-ity of two well-known safety management theories (safety man-agement systems theory and resilience engineering theory) to apractical safety problem: managing safety of military expedition-ary organizations. They show that inconsistently and implicitlyapplying meta-theoretical aspects results in the inability to tacklepractical safety problems. The authors conclude with explicatingsome particular meta-theoretical aspects that seem to be essentialfor the applicability of safety management theory to organizations.

Terje AvenUniversity of Stavanger, Norway

Teemu ReimanVTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Finland