Please welcome Dr. Martin Wortman to the ISE Department. Dr. Wortman is a Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University. He will discuss the three operations-engineering principles that motivated the need for government regulation of safety-critical protective systems.
As always refreshments are available in 428 Daniels Hall 30 minutes before the seminar begins.
Engineers understand that technology-based catastrophes are a consequence of the failure, in either design or operation, of sophisticated protective systems that overlay safety-critical enterprises. Recent high-profile catastrophic failures (the Macondo Blowout, the Fukushima Meltdown, the Lac-Megantic Rail Explosion, and other black swan incidents) have focused public concern and sparked considerable political debate. Yet, for the past two decades
government regulation of safety-critical enterprises has been increasingly under attack from both legislators and business interests. While general regulatory reform is certainly needed, regulation of safety-critical protective systems serves an essential function in ensuring public welfare. This is especially true with certain emergent technologies in the commercial energy and chemical/biologic processing sectors, where production capacity can be incrementally expanded through the deployment of production modules. Beginning with a brief introduction to moral hazard induced by information asymmetry, we will develop three simple analytical arguments that reveal operations principles motivating a need for re-thinking how safety-critical protective systems are engineered and regulated.
Wortman has a longstanding interest in reliability and risk. As a teenager growing up in North Carolina, he destroyed bicycles, shop tools, water skis, power mowers, numerous football helmets, and a 1966 Plymouth. Recognizing that his lifestyle was becoming both dangerous and prohibitively expensive, he began emphasizing a more analytical (and thus less empirical) approach to reliability and risk. He has worked in computational probability for more than 25 years, is past Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Reliability, and is a Professor at Texas A&M University where he leads a comparatively safe existence.
