Engineering safe human-autonomy teaming using STPA-coordination
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-14-2025
Abstract
During the age of above-ground nuclear weapons testing, the effect of vegetation on radiation energy deposition in soil was computationally too challenging to study. Today, improvements in high-performance computing, mature and accurate radiation transport models, and user-friendly optimization and statistical analysis software packages enable investigations into modeling and quantifying the impact of forest vegetation on the prompt gamma-ray energy deposition within the soil from an atmospheric nuclear weapon detonation. Our approach simulates radiation transport, amasses results, and statistically analyzes the results using CUBIT®, Dakota, and MCNP® to perform meshing, geometry creation, and radiation transport. Depending on the forest parameters, there is 0.16% --1.3% change in photon energy deposition in the soil. This research successfully demonstrates a methodology for streamlining a complex radiation modeling effort across multiple codes to quantify and answer a nuclear weapons effects question.
Source Publication
Safety Science (ISSN 0925-7535)
Recommended Citation
Pennington, E. S., Johnson, K. E., Hobbs, K. L., & Colombi, J. M. (2026). Engineering safe human-autonomy teaming using STPA-coordination. Safety Science, 193, 107011. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2025.107011
Comments
This subscription-access article was published online by Elsevier in October 2025 as an article of Safety Science, ahead of inclusion in Volume 193 of that journal, to be issued in January 2026.