What is STAMP?
STAMP is an accident causality model based on systems theory and systems thinking. It covers causes that failure-based models handle poorly, such as complex software, human decision making and human factors, new technology, social and organizational design, and safety culture. STPA is a hazard and cybersecurity analysis method built on STAMP, and CAST is its counterpart for analyzing accidents and incidents. They look for causes that traditional methods often overlook, such as unsafe interactions between components that each work as designed. Both are now used around the world in almost every industry.
What happens at the workshop
Each year MIT hosts an industry workshop where practitioners share their latest uses of STAMP-based methods such as STPA and CAST, meet others using them, and hear about applications, evaluations, and new developments in system safety and cybersecurity.
The first day usually offers short tutorials that introduce STAMP, STPA, CAST, and related methods. The following days are presentations, panels, and poster sessions from organizations around the world that want to share their experience. The tutorials give newcomers the basics, and the talks show the methods at work on real systems. Together they're a good start, and the getting started page lists other resources if you want to learn more.
The whole workshop is free and open to the public. You just need to register in advance.
Who comes
Presenters come from industry, government, and universities. Industries represented include automotive, aviation, air traffic control, medical devices, healthcare, oil and gas, rail, chemicals, space, human factors, robotics, security, defense, and workplace safety. The 2020 workshop, held online, drew more than 2,000 participants.
Countries, industries, and organizations that have taken part
Presentation topics
- Experience using STPA, STPA-Sec, and CAST
- Introducing STAMP, STPA, and CAST into large organizations
- Safety-guided and security-guided design using STPA
- Using STPA to make decisions
- Accident and loss analyses
- War stories: something that went wrong in an organization, such as an outage investigated with CAST or a troubled project where STPA was brought in, and what the organization learned
- Certification and regulatory applications
- Evaluations and comparisons with traditional methods
- Risk management and leading indicators
- Security and other areas, such as workplace safety
- Developing and evaluating safety management systems
- Tools that support STPA and CAST
- Management and adoption experience and challenges
- Emergent properties beyond safety and security
- Other STAMP-related topics
Want to present? See the call for presentations.
Stay connected
A low-traffic mailing list sends workshop announcements, and the STAMP Forum is open for year-round discussion of STAMP, STPA, and CAST.
Keep in touch with the STAMP community