Supervision and Safety of Complex Systems

Chapter 1Safety and Performance of Electricity Production Facilities ¹

 

 

 

In an increasingly demanding regulatory, legal and social context, power utilities always look for the improvement of the safety and performance of their plants. In the long term they do this by preserving, or even extending the lifetime of their industrial assets. For instance from EDF's (Electricité de France) point of view, this leads to three challenges.

The first challenge is complexity, the complexity of a nuclear, hydraulic or thermal power plant, of an electricity transport network, etc. Risk assessment and management requires understanding a sociotechnical system at every level and in every dimension: the component (itself constituted of elementary components), the equipment (made up of components), the technical system, (combination of pieces of equipment), the individuals and teams organized in complex structures who design or run the system and, last but not least, the environment of the system (natural, technological, organizational, regulation, etc.)

For this challenge, our research projects deal with the methods and tools for the assessment of the risks of a system run by humans, for the design of work situations adapted to humans, and for the organizational diagnostic of the safety and resilience of an organization.

The second challenge is uncertainty. It is everywhere: in physical phenomena and associated hazards, in their measure, their modeling, and in any human activity.

To manage uncertainty, ...