Call for Papes: Workshop on Maintenance Work in Safety-critical Organizations

This workshop will address the challenge of understanding maintenance work in safety-critical organizations and its characteristic sources of performance variability. Although maintenance studies have been an integrated part of safety research and developments, we argue that these developments are often constrained by industry barriers and believe that more emphasis on understanding maintenance work and its requirements cross high-hazards industries would contribute to further progress.

Topics to be addressed
Research and development on maintenance has had a dual focus on maintenance as a source of latent and active failures in the system as well as maintenance as a necessary and critical function in the organization. One of the challenges is how to deal with the fact that maintenance is in fact both, simultaneously. Subsequent relevant questions to be asked are:

• How to reduce the potential of maintenance to contribute to system failure and at the same time enhance its contribution to system safety and reliability?
• Can we separate the success factors of maintenance organizations from the failure factors, or pathogens, of the same organizations?
• How to apply different concepts of human factors and safety, such as Resilience Engineering, in the maintenance domain and what are their benefits?
• How to develop system safety in maintenance?
• Do we need new approaches for designing and managing reliable and resilient maintenance organizations?   
• What is the role of maintenance in the context of the overall socio-technical system? For example, how is maintenance affected by management strategies or cost pressures? How well is the role of maintenance understood in the wider organization?  
• What is the relation of new forms of organizing work (outsourcing, integrated operations etc) on safety in maintenance?
• What can we learn about safety from looking cross high-risk domains and how to work to achieve this? What are the constraints for learning cross industrial domains?

Practical aspects
Workshop dates:      October 19–21, 2011
Location:                     University of Stavanger, Norway
Audience:                    Looking for a mix of academics, policy makers, regulators as well as industry people; Seniors as well as younger researchers or professionals
Output:                        Journal Issue or a book for a selection of the best papers
Abstracts:                    Received end of May 2011
Paper selection:        Mid June 2011
Papers received:       End of September 2011
Program issued:       End of September 2011
Format:                        Papers circulated in advance   

The workshop is organized by the IEA Process Control Technical Committee

Contacts (Abstracts and Papers): teemu.reiman@vtt.fi and kenneth.a.pettersen@uis.no

To submit a paper, please check the Call for Papers (pdf, 104 kb) 

Look  forward to see you in Stavanger!
Teemu Reiman (VTT)
Kenneth Pettersen (University of Stavanger)