[SystemSafety] Root Cause Analysis

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

I have been involved in the IEC standardisation project for Root Cause Analysis, being undertaken by 
TC56 WG3 (the project team designation is PT3.23) for those who want to look it up on www.iec.ch

I wrote some material, including
* a set of terms and definitions compatible as far as possible with the International 
Electrotechnical Vocabulary (IEV, at www.electropedia.org , also IEC 60050)
* short descriptions (2-3pp) of four methods, Accimaps, MES, SOL and WBA, along with comments on 
strengths and limitations

It appears at time of writing that this material will not be used. I think it could be useful to 
others, so I put it all together on a paper on the RVS WWW site.

I just wrote a blog post at http://www.abnormaldistribution.org/2013/02/05/root-cause-analysis/ 
which references the paper, and also includes a list of what I think are the currently most-useful 
methods in industrial use for root cause analysis for accidents and significant individual 
incidents. (I distinguish this from root cause analysis for quality control, in which methods such 
as "5 Why's" are thought to be helpful and Fishbone Diagrams are thought of as sophisticated; both 
are useless for the analysis of complex individual incidents. Some methods such as WBA are used for 
both.)

I'd be grateful for pointers to methods I have omitted. I would be even more grateful if people 
would like to write short synopses in the form used in the paper for some of these methods! Then we 
can put all the contributions on the WWW for people to read.

PBL

-- 
Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de