Abstract:

It is in urgent need of the new analysis methods that are used to identify the potential hazardous interactions among components in the engineering system. After discussing the engineering system safety as an emergent property, the paper suggests that the research on safety should be viewed as a complex system problem. By means of the complexity theory, functional modeling principle, and goal tree-success tree modeling technique, a method based on the integrated safety risk model is presented for investigating and identifying the emergence. Taking the Apollo 15 spaceship incident as an example, the model is illustrated in the application of identifying emergence. As a result of that, the proposed modeling method is demonstrated to be an alternative way of solving the safety problem in complex engineering systems.