This is a Related Course of the MOT Program
This is a course
for both graduate and undergraduate students. This is a course that has
been designed for engineers from all disciplines of engineering. This is
a course
that could be very useful for students from Business and Public Policy.
Since the dawn of engineering, engineers have been concerned with how to
prevent failures. But, in spite of these concerns, and with the background
of the tremendous progress
that has been made by engineering and the generally very successful outcomes
from engineering, today we see many examples of major failures of engineered
systems (e.g. East Coast blackout, Columbia shuttle accident, 9-11 World
Trade Towers collapse). There are many more such failures that we do not
hear much about because they end up in the courts. This course addresses
the primary element that has been involved in these failures of engineered
systems: humans and their organizations.
This course advances the concept that humans and their organizations are
an integral part of the engineering paradigm and that it is up to engineering
to learn how to better
integrate considerations of people into engineering systems of all types.
This course focuses this concept on the assessment and management of the
risks associated with engineered systems during their life-cycle (concept
development through decommissioning). Risks (likelihoods and consequences)
are addressed in the contexts of the desired quality from an engineered
system including serviceability (fitness for purpose), safety (freedom from
undue exposure to harm), compatibility (on time, on budget, with happy customers
including the environment), and durability (freedom from unexpected degradations
in the other quality characteristics). Reliability is introduced to enable
assessment of the wide variety of hazards, uncertainties, and variabilities
that are present during the life-cycle of an engineered system. Proactive
(get ahead of the challenges), Reactive (learn the lessons from successes
and failures), and Interactive (realtime assessment and management of unknown
knowables and unknown unknowables) strategies are advanced and illustrated
to assist engineers in the assessment and management of risks.
Course Website (you must have a CalNet ID and password)
Course
Syllabus (pdf)
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