Recent systemic failures such as the subprime financial crisis, BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster, and the Northeast Blackout have reminded us, once again, the large-scale risks in complex socio-technical systems. While these are different disasters that happened in different domains, at different facilities, triggered by different events, involve different materials, etc., there are, however, certain common underlying patterns behind such systemic failures. These patterns teach us important fundamental lessons that we had better learn to avoid future disasters. To understand these patterns and learn from them, we need to go beyond analyzing them as independent one-off accidents but in the broader perspective of the potential fragility of all complex engineered systems. We need to study all these disasters from a common systems engineering perspective so that we can thoroughly understand the commonalities as well as the differences in order to better design and control such systems in the future.
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