You are here: Home / Research / Research topics / The value of industrial safety

The value of industrial safety A European program

This research program is divided in two topics: “The value of safety and safety values” and “Resilience: Improving safety management”.

OBJECTIVES

The value of safety and safety values

The first part, the value of safety, concerns the instrumental value of safety: is it possible to quantify the benefits of safety investments, in particular when they concern organizational and human factors? The second part, Safety values, concerns the intrinsic value of safety. What are the societal values that lead us to demand ever-safer facilities? The possible conflict between these two viewpoints on values, value and safety is of interest to safety regulators and to company directors.

Resilience: Improving safety management

Resilience is a concept that was introduced more than 20 years ago. The work carried out within the SAF€RA framework gets implemented through various industrial safety practices: integration of the concept of resilience into risk analysis methods,  understanding our aversion to disasters and its impact on the establishment of regulations, training managers of resilient organizations.

program

The SAF€RA ERA-NET launched its first European call for scientific proposals on industrial safety: “Human and organizational factors including the value of industrial safety” in September, 2013. Ten projects were selected for funding.

In association with other funding organizations participating in SAF€RA, the Foncsi supporteds seven projects, for an amount of 485 000 euros.

PROJECTS

  • Training for operational resilience capabilities

Research teams: SINTEF (Norway), TNO (Netherlands), Daedalus SAS (France)
The objective: to develop training programs that improve the resilience of organizations and the arbitration between managed safety and regulated safety.

  • The Value of safety

Research teams: FIOH (Finland), TNO (Netherlands)
The objective: how do boards of directors and managers define safety values, how do stakeholders establish a consensus on values, what kind of challenges can be encountered when applying safety values.

  • Success in the face of uncertainty: human resilience and the accident risk bow-tie

Research teams: White Queen BV (Netherlands), Technical University of Denmark (Denmark), Anne van Galen Consultancy (France), NCRS Demokritos (Greece).
The objective: how to integrate notions stemming from resilience with the bow tie risk analysis  tool, and more particularly with an implementation used by the RIVM to analyze numerous occupational accidents in the Netherlands.

  • Safety preferences for health-related industrial risks

Research teams: LERNA-INRA, Toulouse School of Economics (France), Engineering Risk Analysis Group, TU München (Germany), Flesh of Mathematical Statistics, TU München (Germany)
The objective: economic modelling of aversion to disasters and analysis of the regulations in various fields in order to identify how different sectors accept or reject risk.

  • SocioTechnical safety assessment within risk regulation regimes

Research teams: MOUNTAIN BIKE Technical Research Center of Finland (Finland), INERIS (France), University of Stavanger (Norway).
The objective: how to integrate research on the sociotechnical systems  into supervisory authorities' inspection practices. Case studies in nuclear power, chemistry and offshore with a comparison between Finland-France-Norway

  • Exploring contributions of civil society to safety

Research teams: Mutadis (France), Regional Environmental Centre for Central and Eastern Europe (Slovenia), University of Ljubljana - Faculty of sciences (Slovenia), EnergiaKlub (Hungary)
The objective:governance, dialogue and the manner in which they can impact risk management.

  • Promoting safety as an emergent property of a resilient system to managers

Research teams: University of Genova (Italy), ICSI (France)
The objective: how to promote safety by training managers in resilient organizations.

For further information

> https://projects.safera.eu/projects/