Power Law Behavior and Self-Similarity in Modern Industrial Accidents

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2015

Authors

António Mendes Lopes (Author) FEUP; Tenreiro Machado, JAT (Author) Other

Journal

Title: International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos in Applied Sciences and Engineering

Vol. 25

Final page: 1550004

ISSN: 0218-1274

Publisher: World Scientific

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 2 Citations

Scopus - 5 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00A-7N1

DOI: 10.1142/s0218127415500042

Abstract (EN): Advances in technology have produced more and more intricate industrial systems, such as nuclear power plants, chemical centers and petroleum platforms. Such complex plants exhibit multiple interactions among smaller units and human operators, rising potentially disastrous failure, which can propagate across subsystem boundaries. This paper analyzes industrial accident data-series in the perspective of statistical physics and dynamical systems. Global data is collected from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) during the time period from year 1903 up to 2012. The statistical distributions of the number of fatalities caused by industrial accidents reveal Power Law (PL) behavior. We analyze the evolution of the PL parameters over time and observe a remarkable increment in the PL exponent during the last years. PL behavior allows prediction by extrapolation over a wide range of scales. In a complementary line of thought, we compare the data using appropriate indices and use different visualization techniques to correlate and to extract relationships among industrial accident events. This study contributes to better understand the complexity of modern industrial accidents and their ruling principles.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 12