 During the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS 2010) Alexei Sharpanskykh (VU University Amsterdam) and Sybert Stroeve (NLR Air Transport Safety Institute) received the 'Best Industry Track Paper Award' for their paper 'Can we predict safety culture?'
AAMAS is the premier scientific conference for research on multi-agent systems. It has a rigorous selection process. For the last conference on May 10 to 14 in Toronto (Canada), there were 685 entries, of which 163 were elected as a full paper and 136 as extended abstract.
The paper presents a new way to describe and predict safety culture in an organization. Safety culture concerns the values, beliefs and attitudes prevailing in an organization's safety-related processes. It is a core concept for Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) and airlines.
Under the EUROCONTROL CARE Innovative Research III project, NLR and VU University Amsterdam developed an agent-based model for safety culture in the context of incident reporting by air traffic controllers. The model outlines the organization around incident reporting and describes the impact of national culture, group processes and management. The model was tested using data from a EUROCONTROL study where safety culture of an air traffic control organization was analyzed by surveys and workshops. The model predictions were found to correspond well with these data. It was concluded that in connection with survey studies, this type of modeling can help to systematically analyze and improve safety culture.
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