Recent systemic failures in different domains have reminded us, once again, of the fragility of complex sociotechnical systems. Although the failures occurred in very different domains, there are, however, certain common underlying mechanisms driving these disasters. Understanding these mechanisms is essential to avoid such disasters in the future. To understand them, one needs to go beyond analyzing them as independent one-off accidents, and examine them in the broader perspective of the potential fragility of sociotechnical systems. It is their scale, nonlinearity, inter-connectedness, and interactions with humans and the environment that can make these systems fragile. Here we present an overview of the challenges and opportunities in the modeling and analysis of sociotechnical systems. We highlight a control-theoretic modeling framework that unifies the social and the technical components. We discuss how certain problems can be addressed by using concepts and techniques from causal modeling, game theory, and behavioral economics.

最近在不同领域出现的系统性故障再次使我们想起了复杂的社会技术系统的脆弱性。尽管故障发生在非常不同的域中，但是存在某些共同的潜在机制来驱动这些灾难。了解这些机制对于避免将来发生此类灾难至关重要。要理解它们，除了将其视为独立的一次性事故之外，还需要从社会技术系统的潜在脆弱性的更广泛角度进行研究。正是它们的规模，非线性，相互联系以及与人类和环境的相互作用才使这些系统变得脆弱。在这里，我们对社会技术系统的建模和分析中的挑战和机遇进行了概述。我们着重介绍一个控制理论建模框架，该框架将社会和技术组件统一在一起。我们讨论了如何使用因果模型，博弈论和行为经济学中的概念和技术来解决某些问题。