Peter Bernard Ladkin

Peter Bernard Ladkin is Professor of Computer Networks and Distributed Systems at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. He specializes in safety and failure analysis of complex heterogeneous systems, mostly in public transportation, primarily air and rail, but also infrastructure such as power generation. He has worked in the past on constraint satisfaction problems and temporal reasoning, and performed combinatorial analysis of message-passing in concurrent systems. He contributed for many years regularly to the ACM's on-line Forum on Risks to the Public in Computing and Related Systems (the Risks Forum). He blogs at abnormaldistribution.org.

Peter is the originator of Why-Because Analysis (WBA) for the causal analysis of untoward incidents and accidents, as well as Ontological Hazard Analysis (OHA) for relatively complete hazard analysis and traceability of safety requirements through refinement in system development.