Organizational culture as prerequisite of proactive safety and security management in critical infrastructure systems including hazardous plants and ports

This article addresses selected aspects of organizational culture to be considered in the context of knowledge based proactive safety and security management of plants, ports and systems of critical infrastructure. It has been often emphasized in the domain literature that business effectiveness of such plants and their resilience against hazards and threats to avoid major accidents depends substantially on human and organizational factors. It becomes obvious that appropriate shaping of these factors is crucial and should be considered in life cycle. Some terms have been also introduced such as safety culture and security culture. Current research topic in this domain includes an interface between safety and security. The article discusses these issues in the context of knowledge based proactive safety and security management being a new challenge, especially in cases of hazardous plants, ports and other complex systems of critical infrastructure. Nevertheless a crucial role plays the human-operator undertaking safety-related decisions during potential abnormal situations and accidents. Below some issues concerning requirements for the alarm system design in context of human factors are outlined and discussed.