Major Accidents (Gray Swans) Likelihood Modeling Using Accident Precursors and Approximate Reasoning

Analyzing Subway Operation Accidents Causations: Apriori Algorithm and Network Approaches

Subway operation safety management has become increasingly important due to the severe consequences of accidents and interruptions. As the causative factors and accidents exhibit a complex and dynamic interrelationship, the proposed subway operation accident causation network (SOACN) could represent the actual scenario in a better way. This study used the SOACN to explore subway operation safety risks and provide suggestions for promoting safety management. The SOACN model was built under 13 accident types, 29 causations and their 84 relationships based on the literature review, grounded theory and association rule analysis, respectively. Based on the network theory, topological features were obtained to showcase different roles of an accident or causation in the SOACN, including degree distribution, betweenness centrality, clustering coefficient, network diameter, and average path length. The SOACN exhibits both small-world network and scale-free features, implying that propagation in the SOACN is fast. Vulnerability evaluation was conducted under network efficiency, and its results indicated that safety management should focus more on fire accident and passenger falling off the rail. This study is beneficial for capturing the complex accident safety-risk-causation relationship in subway operations. It offers suggestions regarding safety-related decision optimization and measures for causation reduction and accident control with high efficiency.

Operational safety economics: Foundations, current approaches and paths for future research

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the trade-off between economics and epidemic prevention (safety) has become painfully clear worldwide. This situation thus highlights the significance of balancing the economy with safety and health. Safety economics, considering the interdependencies between safety and micro-economics, is ideal for supporting this kind of decision-making. Although economic approaches such as cost-benefit analysis and cost-effectiveness analysis have been used in safety management, little attention has been paid to the fundamental issues and the primary methodologies in safety economics. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic study on safety economics to analyze the foundational issues and explore the possible approaches. Firstly, safety economics is defined as a transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary field of academic research focusing on the interdependencies and coevolution of micro-economies and safety. Then we explore the role of safety economics in safety management and production investment. Furthermore, to make decisions more profitable, economic approaches are summarized and analyzed for decision-making about prevention investments and/or safety strategies. Finally, we discuss some open issues in safety economics and possible pathways to improve this research field, such as security economics, risk perception, and multi-criteria analysis.