ABSTRACT
The concern for accidents and their causes has attracted considerable interest in the last half of the twentieth century, mainly due to a number of spectacular accidents in complex industrial systems. The more famous of these are the explosion at the Flixborough plant (1974); the accident at the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island (1979); the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle (1986); the meltdown at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl (1986); the aircraft collision at Tenerife (1977); and the multitude of problems on the space station MIR (1998).
