Dr. John P. Thomas

Prior to joining MIT, Dr. Thomas held engineering positions in the aerospace, automotive, defense, telecom, and other sectors. After recognizing patterns in the challenges that arise in large complex systems, he returned to academia to pursue a Ph.D. in systems engineering to address these challenges. Today, Dr. Thomas is a member of the aeronautics and astronautics department at MIT where he works to develop more effective solutions and demonstrate them on real applications with industry partners.

Dr. Thomas's work produces structured processes for analyzing cyber-physical systems, especially systems that may behave in unanticipated, unsafe, or otherwise undesirable ways through complex interactions with each other and their environment. By using theory and systems theory, more efficient and effective design and analysis processes can be created to prevent flaws and identify hidden assumptions that will lead to unexpected and undesirable behaviors when they are operated in the real world. More recently he has been applying these techniques to systems that rely on complex human interactions to achieve safety and security goals. These systems may not only be subject to human error--they may inadvertently induce human error through mode confusion, clumsy automation, and other mechanisms that can be difficult to anticipate.

Much of Dr. Thomas's work is focused on developing systems approaches to engineering and analysis including Systems Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA). He developed the formal structure to define STPA steps like Unsafe Control Actions (UCAs), Loss Scenarios (with or without a UCA), and other process steps to help ensure potentially hazardous or undesirable interactions are systematically identified and controlled. He has created algorithms to use STPA to automatically generate formal executable and model-based requirements for software components as well as methods to detect flaws in an existing software specification. The same process can be applied to address security and functional goals of the system, thereby permitting the automated detection of conflicts between these and other goals during early development processes.

He has collaborated extensively with industry groups to teach STPA, integrate it into engineering processes, and to define the certification framework that enables professionals to become certified in using STPA. He is a member of international committees responsible for authoring safety engineering standards including ARP4761A, ISO26262, and J3187A.