A Safety Data Model for data analysis and decision making

Abstract

The systems related to safety are becoming more and more important and are dependent on complex data both in terms of volume and variety. This is especially of importance in applications demanding data analysis, intensive maintenance and focuses on the potential threats due to possible data errors, such as railway signaling, traffic management etc. Errors in analysis of data could result in loss of many lives and financial loss such as the cases of Annabella container ship- Baltic Sea accident (United Kingdom Merchant Shipping, Regulations 2005 – Regulation 5). Despite these potential errors in data leading to accidents or mishaps, this part of the system has been ignored; this study focuses on the integrity of data in safety critical applications. It did so by developing a method for building metadata through a data chain, mining this metadata and representing it in such a way that a consumer of the data can judge the integrity of the data and factor this into the decision-making aspect of their response. This research proposes a design, implementation and evaluation of a safety data model that helps to ensure integrity of data use for data analysis and decision making to prevent loss of lives and properties. Modern and sophisticated ETL software tools including Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Data Tools and Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio were explored. The data were extracted from Safety Related Condition Reports (SRCRs) dataset and used data mining techniques to transform and filter unsafe and hazardous data from the extracted data and stored the safe data into the Data Warehouses (DWs). The prototype was able to load data into designated DWs. The success of the developed model proved that the prototype was able to extract all datasets, transform and load data into the DWs and moved extracted files to archive folder within 7.406 seconds.