The Secure and Safety Critical Systems Department at ISSNOVA focuses on the resilience and performance analysis of systems and services operating in contexts where failure could result in significant harm to people, environment, or critical infrastructure. Our interdisciplinary approach integrates technology assessment, process optimization, and human-centered design to ensure that safety-critical systems maintain their intended functions under both normal and exceptional conditions.
Research Focus
Our work addresses the full lifecycle of safety-critical systems across multiple domains:
- Human Factors Integration: Systematic consideration of human performance, decision-making, and interaction with/in advaanced systems throughout the design and operational phases
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Resilience Engineering: Development of methodologies to assess and improve system resilience against technological failures, cyber threats, insider threats and environmental stressors
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Vulnerability Analysis: Identification of critical dependencies, failure modes, and cascading risks in complex socio-technical systems
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Safety Culture Assessment: Evaluation of organizational and societal safety culture among populations, protection agencies, and institutional stakeholders
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Critical Infrastructure Protection: Analysis and enhancement of security and safety for water, energy, food systems, and transport networks (aerial, terrestrial, and maritime)
- Human Factors Assessment: Analysis of socio-technical systems applying a suite of HF and physical, cognitive and organizational ergonomics techniques e such as task analysis, link analysis, FRAM, eye tracking, NASA TLX and cognititive workload assessment, usability testing, physical workload.
Our expertise supports responsible research and innovation in emerging technologies where security and safety requirements must be balanced with operational performance and societal needs. Our cross-cutting approach merges social and hard sciences to address the technical, procedural, and human dimensions of safety- and security-critical systems. We employ evidence-based design practices including scenarios analysis, case studies, demonstrators, and human-centeredness metrics to support sustainable and secure system development. This methodology enables us to deliver optimized solutions that account for both technological capabilities and the diversity of human factors across en-uders and target groups.