NATCA Bookshelf

12 COMMUNICATING FOR SAFETY • 2023 Speaker Spotlight John Thomas, Ph.D. Executive Director of MIT's Engineering Systems Lab N ATCA is honored to welcome a leading expert in system-theoretic accident model and process (STAMP) based methods like system theoretic process analysis (STPA) to CFS 2023. That technical jargon means that accidents generally result from inadequate enforcement of system safety constraints in design, development, and operations and that through analysis one can understand the entire systemic causal factors involved in an accident. Dr. Thomas holds a Ph.D. in Engineering Systems and is a member of the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is the Executive Director of MIT's Engineering Systems Lab (ESL). The ESL studies the underlying principles and methods for designing complex socio-technical systems that involve a mix of architecture, technologies, organizations, policy issues, and complex networked operations. Prior to joining MIT, Dr. Thomas spent several years in industry working for aerospace, automotive, and defense companies. Dr. Thomas's professional work involves creating structured processes for analyzing cyber-physical systems, especially systems that may behave in unanticipated, unsafe, or otherwise undesirable ways through complex interactions with each other and their environment. By using control theory and systems theory, more efficient and effective design and analysis processes can be created to prevent flaws that lead to unexpected and undesirable behaviors when integrated with other systems. More recently he has been applying these techniques to automated systems that are heavily dependent on human-computer interactions to achieve safety and security goals. These automated systems may not only be subject to human error. They may inadvertently induce human error through mode confusion, clumsy automation, and other mechanisms that can be difficult to anticipate. Dr. Thomas's work involves developing systems approaches to engineering and analysis including Systems Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), including the formal underlying structure that can be used to help ensure potentially hazardous or undesirable software behaviors are systematically identified and controlled. He has also developed algorithms to automatically generate formal executable and model- based requirements for software components as well as methods to detect flaws in an existing software specification. The same process can be applied to address security and functional goals of the system, thereby permitting the automated detection of conflicts between these and other goals during early development processes.

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