Characterizing performance in socio-technical systems: A modeling framework in the domain of nuclear power

In modeling complex socio-technical systems, the critical nature of many interactions between human and automation are often unrecognized until the system experiences catastrophic consequences. One reason for this is that the systems are generally very robust and serious problems are rare. Another reason is the difficulty in modeling the variety of interactions in a manner compatible with analytical and/or computational models of the technological components of the system. Organizational issues and extraneous influences add to these modeling difficulties. We have developed a modeling framework that integrates certain ideas from social networks, graph theory, and simulation, all tied together using heuristics that reflect deep domain knowledge. This framework forms the basis for a computational implementation, portions of which have been implemented. Details of the model and the rationale for the model structure are described in this paper.