RiskSOAP: On the Relationship Between Systems Safety and the Risk SA Provision Capability

It is generally accepted that there is a relation between safety and awareness. Yet, there is no quantitative evidence for this relationship because the correlated entities are difficult to be quantified. This paper responds to this challenge by measuring the “risk situation awareness (SA) provision (RiskSOAP) capability.” According to the complex sociotechnical system design and development, there is an inherent capability of each system part to provide its agent with SA about the presence of system threats and vulnerabilities, possibly leading to accidents. This capability is called herein “risk SA” and stems from the number, type, and characteristics of the elements that shape the system parts; laying the foundation for the emergence of risk SA on a system level. Under this notion, this paper adopts the RiskSOAP methodology as a means to quantify the different states of a system in terms of its RiskSOAP capability, using the Überlingen mid-air collision accident as a case study. The case study results showed that the RiskSOAP capability degrades while the system is headed to the accident state. This is attributed to the presence of flaws in the system involved in the Überlingen accident. This study also offers insight to the limitations of the proposed methodology and suggests the future work to overcome them.