231十五章论文21十五章论文.doc

J.H. Saleh, C.C. Pendley / Reliability Engineering and System Safety 99 (2012) 105–113 107 Short-term Medium-term Long-term Safety levers Time to affect system safety  Regulatory Accident investigators, safety inspectors, and regulators (penalties) Insurers Economic (incentives) Shareholders Organizational / Managers and company executives Managerial Operational / Technicians, operators, workers Maintenance Technical / Engineers and system designers Design Research Researchers and academics Education Students Fig. 1. Safety levers and stakeholders in the safety value chain (not meant to be exhaustive).  Learning however is multileveled and it can take place for example at the organization level, the broader sector or industry level, and the regulatory level [24]. In this work, we explore what can be learned from system accidents at the engineering students’ level, and in essence, we shift the focus from ‘‘learning from accidents’’ to ‘‘teaching about accidents and system safety’’. The remainder of this article is organized as follows. Section 2 provides the conceptual background, of learning loops and safety value chain, within which the role of engineering education in accident prevention is discussed. Section 3 advances several arguments for why accident causation and system safety should be taught to engineering students. Section 4 proposes a set of themes that can be taught about this subject and how this multidisciplinary teaching can be structured and delivered. Section 4 also discusses the author’s experience with the teaching of such a course for the past several years at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Section 5 concludes this work. 2. Conceptual background: learning loops and the safety value chain This section provides a general overview of the context within which we discuss the role of engineering education in accident prevention, and why safety competence should be taught and nurtured in engineering