MIT Aims to STAMP Out Accidents

摘要

Nancy Leveson, Ph.D., professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been on a 30+ year quest to engineer out hazards that can lead to aircraft accidents. Her Systems Theoretic Accident Model and Processes or, simply, STAMP, eschews the quick-and-dirty, blame-the-pilots approach to post-accident analysis and instead embraces a holistic approach to identifying, analyzing and eliminating a wide range of hazards during aircraft design, development and construction, as well as in everyday operation. "Hazard analysis can be thought of as investigating an accident before it occurs," Leveson writes in her 2004 paper "A New Accident Model for Engineering Safer Systems." "The most effective models will go beyond assigning blame and instead help engineers to learn as much as possible about all the factors involved, including those related to social and organization structures." She emphasizes that when safety investigators simply sift accident data through traditional filters, they risk biasing the results in favor of only historical events or conditions. But if they choose to look outside those constraints, they may uncover a whole host of causal or contributing factors that previously may have been overlooked.