An Initial Framework Assessing the Safety of Complex Systems

There is no doubt that our lives are dependant on a diverse range of critical systems and infrastructure that are becoming increasingly complex. This raises difficult questions around how do we ensure the safety of these complex engineered systems (where by engineered we mean that they are at least partly deliberately designed), when they exhibit many if not all of the characteristics of complex systems [1, 2]? These properties include emergence, selforganisation, non-linearity and so on. Thus, we are not able to predict all the behaviours of a system from knowledge about its parts and their interactions alone, due to systems having emergent properties, something that has long been understood by the complex systems field.