Collaborative Modeling with Fuzzy Cognitive Maps: A Novel Approach to Achieving Safety Culture

Description: Researchers plan to develop and test a scenario-planning toolkit that oil and gas industry stakeholders can use to explore the factors that strengthen or detract from their organization’s safety culture. They will consider how these factors can be modeled collaboratively, whether modeling can address uncertainty about these factors and their causal relationships, if this exercise helps participants understand what bolsters and hinders safety culture, and whether their participation results in actionable outcomes. Researchers hope this project will produce a modeling approach that organizations can use to develop context-specific safety culture training that is tailored to their unique needs.

Funding Cycle: Safer Offshore Energy Systems 2
Funding Organization: National Academies of Science, Engineering, Medicine: Gulf Research Program

Bringing High-Reliability Safety Culture Decisions into Focus: Training with Interactive Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping

Description: Several studies have called for offshore oil and gas workers to adopt best practices from other high-risk industries, including the nuclear power plant and air traffic control industries. However, frontline managers remain unaware of these external best practices, or have trouble customizing them for offshore oil and gas operations. Inspired by so-called “management flight simulators,” this project creates an interactive online platform that allows users to model responses to everyday safety threats. The platform, FOCOS (Fuzzy Operational Cognition of Safety Culture), lets users add, intensify, or stop interventions, and see how their decisions impact the overall system and safety culture. To inform future research and pilot programs, FOCOS will also collect data on uncertain and controversial safety practices and differences in training needs among different users (by role, professional background, and years of experience).

Funding Cycle: Safer Offshore Energy Systems 4
Funding Organization: National Academies of Science, Engineering, Medicine: Gulf Research Program

iEMSs 2018 Proceedings: Exploratory Participatory Modeling with FCM to Overcome Uncertainty

iEMSs 2018 Proceedings: Open Source Tool in R Language to Estimate the Inference of the Fuzzy Cognitive Map in environmental decision making

FCM Python Package

Inference of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs)

Participatory Modeling