Our research themes

You will find below a short description of the research themes that the ICSI and FonCSI have worked on, to this date.

Operational experience feedback

Experience feedback or lessons learned analysis (referred to in French by the more eloquent expression le retour d'expérience, the “return of experience”) is an essential component of the management of industrial risks. Whereas the technical aspects of these procedures (database management, definition of event typologies) are generally well managed by firms, they often encounter problems of a non-technical nature which hinder experience feedback:

• people hesitate to report incidents when they fear blame or other negative consequences for themselves or for colleagues;
• it is difficult to motivate workers concerning events that occurred elsewhere than on their site (or affected a subcontractor, or another industrial sector);
• the initial efforts to feed incidents into the system and undertake detailed analyses sometimes decrease over time, as the payback from these efforts is not immediately visible;

These constraints on the long-term success of experience feedback activities in better understanding real activity in industrial facilities, in helping to structure continuous improvement of safety, were the subject of our 2004 Call for Proposals, leading to our funding seven PhD theses and one research project (content in French). The issue of organizational learning has also been the subject of several NeTWork workshops, one of which was sponsored by FonCSI.

Arbitration between partially conflicting goals: safety, economic performance, legal and societal constraints

Safety is an important goal for most organisations. However, decision-makers must also take other requirements into account: economic goals such as cost-cutting, innovation and business continuity; legal and societal requirements such as public tolerability of risk and aspirations for a more democratic decision-making process. There is a need better to understand how decision-makers arbitrate between maintaining stringent safety goals and these other considerations, at multiple levels: inside companies, in local government, at the national and european levels, and transversely to these different levels.

This subject is played out at various levels, in various organizations and structures, including:

• bodies for dialogue and consultation/concertation (such as the french Comités d'Hygiène, de Sécurité et des Conditions de Travail); structures created by certain companies to assess industrial risks as a function of economic, socio-political and publicity “risks”;

• bodies for information and concertation (such as the french Comités Locaux d'Information et de Concertation) that bring together different stakeholders (industry, associations, local government, etc.) in a given region;
• bodies that provide advice and expertise as input to the political decision-making process (workgroups, commissions, expert committees, etc.);
• political and legal organizations at various levels (regional, national, European);
• various analysis methods, tools and bodies that may facilitate the arbitration process (cost-benefit analyses, “hybrid forums”, continual analysis of the evolution of science and technology, etc.)

The aim of our work in this area is to better understand how the arbitration between different requirements takes place, and to attempt to suggest changes to make the process more explicit, more understandable, more open to debate. This theme was investigated in FonCSI's 2006 Call for Proposals.

Safety impact of technological, human and organizational vulnerabilities

Safety means guaranteeing the absence of risk of intolerable losses. A great deal of research has been undertaken and applied to attain this objective. However, the proposed solutions generally assume that the state of the environment is known, in particular in terms of human resources, organisational processes and tools. In practice, these conditions are often not satisfied in industry. There is a need better to understand the way in which companies and other organisations that manage potentially hazardous activies may become safer, how they may reinforce their resistance to unwanted change and failure (notion of “resilience”), both at the technical and technological, humain and organisational levels, and at the interface between these various levels.

Among the novel approaches for improving the management of these vulnerabilities, the following research points appear particularly interesting:

• mechanisms and means that encourage continual critical review / assessment of the models and tools used at the end of the design phase to characterise operational risks in operation (given the importance of simulation techniques, the increasing difficulty of revisiting the fundamental assumptions made during the design phase, given also the manner in which these tools and models are learned and used by the people who manage risks);
• mechanisms and means that allow the safety impact of design errors and operational errors to be tolerated;
• new attitudes to rules and regulations; degrees of freedom/autonomy given to individuals or workplace collectives that may help resolve problems caused by the multiplicity of cultural repertoires (systems of values and strategies used to justify one's position on a controversial issue) within companies;
• the organisational designs and operational modes that may allow: vigilance, effective transfer of knowledge and know-how, the development of a “safety memory” (for instance transverse or network-oriented organisations); effective interaction between quality assurance procedures and safety procedures; the detection and analysis of “safety drift”, of processes of “normalisation of deviance” and their integration with the risk management system; the management of increasing diversity in the workforce (in particular due to subcontracting).

This theme was investigated in FonCSI's 2006 Call for Proposals.

Subcontracting and safety

Since more than 20 years, a trend of subcontracting certain activities on industrial plants has appeared. This has led to significant evolutions in industrial firms' organization. Subcontracting allows firms to respond to market evolutions more smoothly, and allows them access to competencies and professional skills that are difficult to maintain internally. Today, subcontracting can represent a significant proportion of the number of hours worked on an industrial facility.

The consequences in termes of safety of this trend are difficult to assess, given the paucity (in particular in France) of statistical data on workplace accidents in subcontracted situtations. While subcontracting is often considered to be a detrimental factor for workplace safety, this area has seen little research.

This subject was investigated by Dounia Tazi in her PhD work (content in French), defended in 2008.

Risk, uncertainty and decision-making

Individuals concerned with the management of hazardous activities are regularly confronted with different forms of uncertainty. This is true of workers on industrial sites, people who operate large infrastructures and networks, who work in research laboratories, for regulatory authorities, for agencies that provide expertise and guidance to government authorities, people who work for insurance companies, etc. It is also true of organizations such as local authorities, non governmental bodies and associations, trade union organizations, and in general, all organizations that may be concerned by the presence of hazardous activities.

Some of these uncertainties concern the nature of the dangers associated with production, transport, or research activities, in particular when new technologies or innovations are introduced. Other types of uncertainty are caused by changes in the organizational, financial and legal context to which hazardous activities must adapt (because of evolution in legislation, or in companies' organization and strategies). Another category of uncertainties arise given changes in the human, social, political and natural context of hazardous activities, in particular structural modifications (to urbanization, for example) and the new role played by stakeholders.

These uncertainties are being reduced in various ways. The evolution from the notion of danger to that of risk (identification of the causes of incidents and accidents; safety margins; defence in depth; probabilistic safety analyses; consequence assessments, etc.) has, in many areas, allowed a reduction of the scope of uncertainties in the management of technological risks. Many tools and processes have been developed in this aim, and different approaches are still being debated (deterministic vs. probabilistic risk assessment, etc.).

Nonetheless, recent research suggests that, for various reasons, this reduction of the scope of uncertainty is becoming an issue, and needs to be addressed in a more direct manner. At the heart of the hazardous activities listed previously, new forms of uncertainty are being introduced by the increased level of concern for human and organizational factors of safety and the need to consider the complexity of socio-technical systems in a global manner. The adequacy of risk management mechanisms (safety margins, barriers) is sometimes questioned given these new uncertainties. The socio-economic, political and environmental context in which these activities operate is becoming increasingly uncertain.

People concerned in different ways by hazardous activities (both people who run or manage dangerous activities, and those who oversee and regulate them, as well as stakeholders who may be concerned by the effects of a hypothetical loss of control) operate in this uncertain environment. The way in which uncertainties are approached, handled, managed, has become a central issue, in particular in numerous scientific debates that have overflowed to the general public, such as those concerning the precautionary principle.

This theme was highlighted in the FonCSI's 2008 Call for Proposals. It also underlies the research project concerning the parametric sensitivity analysis of tools for atmospheric dispersion modelling (applied to Phast -- content in French).

For more information, please consult the list of research projects that we have funded (content in French).