Decision making for safety and risk in healthcare and process systems

Cyber-physical-human systems are ubiquitous entities with varied scales of function. Apart from the systems -level complexity, it also poses a variety of decision-making problems to designers and practitioners. This decision-making is done by humans-in-the-loop, at every level of cyber-physical-human systems, with the help of decision-support tools. For any safety and risk critical cyber-physical-human systems organization, certain key features are useful to assess and compare the organizational functioning. Two such examples are process and healthcare industries, with safety and risk as major objectives. The paper uses the lens of humans-in-the-loop decision-making and decision-support tools to survey how safety and risk are handled in process and health-care industries. Further, a discussion of current practices in the two domains and how future applications will involve more interdisciplinary aspects is provided. The paper concludes by discussing the ethical and data related concerns of a humans-in-the-loop and algorithm based shared decision-making future.

Automated summary

This paper examines how safety and risk are handled in process and healthcare industries, utilizing the perspective of humans-in-the-loop decision-making and decision-support tools. It discusses current practices and the potential for interdisciplinary future applications. The paper concludes by addressing the ethical and data concerns of a humans-in-the-loop and algorithm based shared decision-making future.