Complex Systems Are Very Likely to Experience Accidents :: Challenger Accidents Accident Papers

conglomerate Systems Are Very Likely to Experience Accidents M any(prenominal) people in todays industrial countries have experienced the frustration and exsert of having their car break down. That event, while troublesome, often does not pose any signifi batht danger to people. It is a useful microcosm, however, because cars, like other labyrinthine systems, leave almost certainly malfunction at some full stop during use. While we cannot prove the following assertion for sure, empirical data and observations potently suggest that difficult systems that are made of unreliable components will ineluctably experience fortuitys so long as there exist flaws in the system that have no reliable safeguards. Numerous studies have investigated such(prenominal) a Normal Accident Theory, and two notable cases very strongly indicate its validity petroleum refinery accidents and the space shuttle Challenger, both of which will be discussed in this paper. Normal Accident Theory (NAT) is the label for a school of thought that considers accidents in complex systems to be inevitable. Two characteristics of complex systems that are very important to NAT are the interactive complexity of a system and a systems coupling. Coupling is assured originally by the time between processes in a system, the independent or dependent progression of such processes, and the number of different ways that a systems goal can be achieved (Piccard, 1999). Systems are categorize as tightly coupled, meaning that the time between processes is small, the processes are super interdependent, and there are few paths, if not one, to the goal or more often than not coupled, which is the opposite. These characteristics are particularly useful for comparing different complex systems and evaluating them to determine which are at the highest risk for accidents. The results can then be utilize to minimize, but not eliminate, the possibility that an accident will occu r. Sociologist Charles Perrow is generally credit with developing NAT. In order to understand the principles of NAT, several definitions that it uses are essential. An accident is defined as an event that is unintended, unfortunate, damages people or objects, affects the work of the system of interest, and is non-trivial. (Perrow, 1994) There are two types of accidents component failure accidents, which relate one or more component failures (part, unit, or subsystem) that are colligate in an anticipated sequence, and normal accidents, or system accidents as they can be called (Perrow, 1994).