Adverse Outcome Pathways for Engineered Systems

Abstract

Companies and organizations around the world spend massive amounts of money each year to discover, predict, and remediate failures within engineered systems. By doing so, these groups save lives, reduce costs, and maintain their reputations. However, to effectively and efficiently perform these tasks, companies and organizations rely on individuals with specialized knowledge in a variety of topics related to failure. This knowledge is often acquired through years of academic and on-the-job training centered around the review of scientific documentation such as books, reports, manuals, and peer-reviewed publications. The loss of this knowledge through employee attrition can be detrimental to a group as knowledge is often difficult to reacquire. The aggregation and representation of known failure mechanisms for engineered materials could aid in the sharing of knowledge, the acquisition of knowledge, and the discovery of failure causes, reducing the risk of failure. Thus, the current work proposes the Adverse Outcome Pathway for Engineered Systems (AOP-ES) framework, an extension of the Adverse Outcome Pathway used in toxicology. The AOP-ES is designed to document failure knowledge enabling knowledge transfer and the prediction of failures of novel engineered materials based on the performance of similar materials. This paper introduces the AOP-ES framework and its key elements alongside the principles that govern the framework. An application of the framework is presented and additional benefits are explored.