Actionable Safety Analyses in Socio-technical Systems with myFRAM

Abstract

Complex systems require dedicated models, methods and techniques since safety management in socio-technical systems no longer should rely just on causality principles and structural decomposition. The overall behavior of the system should be considered as emerging from the non-linear interaction of the underlying subsystems. The Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) is one systemic approach allowing for the construction of deeply informative models. Such semantic richness entails a complexity of the resulting models significantly reflecting a useful portion of systems' reality. Unfortunately, as soon as the analyzed systems are little more than mundane, this richness of information becomes unmanageable whenever it is relying only upon qualitative methods. This paper presents myFRAM version 1.0.3, a free Excel add-on that paves the way for a multitude of systematic analysis types ranging from statistics to complex network analysis and simulation. The trust put in myFRAM by many safety experts who have already adopted it, confirms that it is a valuable tool to sustain the FRAM method. This application builds bridges to several different software and techniques currently available, expanding the potential of the method itself.