A Generic BBN Safety Model

The purpose of this paper is to present a generic safety model for socio-technical systems subject to low probability high consequences (LPHC) accidents. The model that uses a Bayesian belief network (BBN) topology contains both the human operators and the technical components woven together and influenced by organisational and sociological factors. This topology has been found to be useful in evaluating the operation and safety of socio-technical systems; i.e., mutual dependent activities of technical and human entities (or subsystems). The BBN topology can be adapted to specific environments of high risk systems and facilitate expert elicitation that adds a quantitative dimension to the basic qualitative model