A Fundamental Reappraisal

Research in the systems group at Bristol has its origins in work by Professor David Blockley on structural safety and reliability. Case histories of structural failure demonstrated a gap between the scope of reliability theory and the actual reasons for failures which in a very proportion are due to human and organisational factors. The work therefore widened into a fundamental reappraisal of our whole approach to civil engineering.

The research has been driven by a desire to get at the fundamental nature of engineering (see for example Blockley D I, The Nature of Structural Design and Safety, Ellis Horwood, Chichester, 1980 - now out of print) both in terms of professional practice and as an academic discipline. We have developed the idea suggested by Schon of reflective practice (Schon D, The Reflective Practitioner, Basic Books, New York 1983) and the testing of hypotheses as emphasised by the philosopher Karl Popper. We have developed new ways of looking at uncertainty and built upon the suggestions of Lotfi Zadeh for a theory of fuzzy sets and the work by Jim Baldwin here at Bristol to produce a theory of interval probability which we are using to assess evidence. For over 10 years until his unfortunate death we worked with Barry Turner developing his ideas about how accidents 'incubate' over many years before a trigger event results in a man made disaster (see Turner B A, Pidgeon N F, Man Made Disasters 2nd Edition, Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford 1998).

We are developing and using this work to deliver news ways of helping engineers to be more effective. We are developing new techniques for addressing very difficult issues (e.g. the management or risk and uncertainty) but more than that we are helping engineers to ask new questions about their role.

The scope of our work in civil engineering is very wide and has included structures (safety and reliability, human and organisational factors, non-linear 'chaotic' structural analysis using novel parallel computing techniques, vulnerability analysis of structures and of general systems); geotechnics (limit state design, knowledge based systems and more recently the Observational Method); safety of old mine workings; water (the effective operation and control of wave energy devices through the computation of vague operating requirements together with real-time sea state prediction, the monitoring of structures and the interpretation of data, coastal engineering) and oil exploration (estimating oil deposits).

A core reading list is available.