Safety and Security Science

The history of the Safety and Security Science Group goes back to 1978 when a symposium was held in Delft to discuss the contribution which could and should be made at university level to safety in society. From this initiative the Group grew, establishing a chair in Safety Science in 1984 and expanding its staff to a multidisciplinary group of some 7 staff members and 25 PhD candidates as of today, including an additional chair in safety of hazardous materials in 2013.

Management of safety and security in the current information era and complex socio-technical society is still inadequate. Its deficiencies are shown by the still frequently occurring small and large accidents, disturbances in organisations and networks, and intentional malicious events  in our societies. It is our vision that research and education on safety and security science will contribute substantially to the understanding  and decrease of these phenomena, resulting in a more sustainable society.

It is our mission to contribute and excel with scientific methods and techniques in developing evidence-based theories and innovative practices, in order to quantify, predict, visualise and optimise risk and hazard levels of loss of human life and multi-variate damage, to acceptable levels.

It is our ambition to take up a leading role in scientific research and education regarding safety and security. We study entities as socio-technical systems, their decision making processes on technical -, human - and organisational  issues, and their conflicts with safety and security. This should result in proactive and reactive measures to improve safety - and security levels while respecting other conflicting values and uncertainties. The approach is based on analysing possible scenarios and conditions leading to incidents, and by probabilistic assessments of cause-consequence relationships of interdependent events and their societal impact. We apply these methodologies to a wide variety of domains, in collaboration with domain-specific experts, in the fields of:

• Critical Infrastructures (Energy, Water, Cyber, etc.)
• Process and Nuclear Industries (Incl. Transport of hazardous materials)
• Transport Sector (Maritime, Aviation, Rail, Road)
• Emergency Response (Fire Dept., Police, Medical, Defence)
• Construction and Manufacturing Sectors
• Health Care Sector