Failures in Engineering System

Abstract

Engineering systems have been becoming more complex in order to meet the needs of society. This puts great deal of pressure on designers, in terms of working with large number of components, complicated component interactions and shared functionality amongst components subsystems. Meeting the needs of society is not the only reason why avoiding engineering system failures is growing in demand as both natural and man-made disasters are showing exponential increase in recent decades. Nevertheless, there is still a gap in the analysis of cases of emergent systems failures. In this research, a clear need for emergent system failure analysis was presented and an exhaustive literature review was undertaken to establish the current approaches of the analysis of emergent system failures with regards to the infrastructure sector. Some of the limitations of current approaches being used are either reductionists, lack feedback or non-contextual, which lead to the work carried out. The selection of case studies was based on a simple criterion developed and Carhart et al., (2020) interdependency classification. A list of 8 dimensions were then developed based on information found in the literature. Finally, a framework that was established by Sharifi (2019) was applied to all case studies to further evaluate their thorough representation of emergent system failure. A comparison of all 5 cases exhibited a form of emergent system failure within the infrastructure sector was carried out based on the results obtained from the analyses. The cases showed a closer proximity in some dimensions (outcome, probability, interactivity, effects on services), more than others such as (effects on humans, effects on environment and system recovery). Based on the Sharifi (2019) framework, the case that performed the best across most factors is case 2 and the least is case 5.