Engineering governance through the provision of intelligent monitoring systems

This paper sets out to describe the development of an Intelligent Monitoring System, to monitor and predict the potential situations that may in future lead to a catastrophe. Based upon documented lessons learnt from past significant catastrophic incidents, the combinations of failures that have led to disasters can be grouped under three distinct Engineering Governance headings of ‘People’, ‘Process’ and ‘Tools’. The intelligence is provided by using data mining software to detect patterns in the collected information. The predictive capability is enhanced using trend analysis and through the adaptation of this information using pre-processors, to find the type and amount of variance necessary to create a recognisable warning pattern. The type of information to collect and the particular data mining tools to use will be the subject of further research and testing.