ENHANCEMENT OF HUMAN RELIABILITY IN SHIPS AND MARITIME SYSTEMS

摘要

Human error continues to represent a major threat to ships, both commercial and military, as well as maritime environments. In recent years the International Maritime Organization, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the U.S. Navy Safety Center have independently reported that human error is the primary cause of over 80% of ship accidents. It is well known that human characteristics can cause or contribute to human errors. These include such factors as fatigue, disorientation, distraction, motivation, forgetting, complacency, confusion, incorrect expectancy or set, excessive stress, boredom, inadequate skills and knowledge, and inadequate or impaired perceptual or cognitive ability. Such factors can certainly contribute to the occurrence of errors, and in some cases even cause errors. It is equally well established that factors associated with the design of systems can influence the potential for human error. Features of system design which influence the incidence of human errors include aspects of the design of hardware, software, procedures, environments, organizations, jobs, and training, as well as task difficulty, time constraints, interfering activities, poor communications, ambiguous lines of authority, information overloads, and excessive workloads. Design features encompass such aspects of the system as: human-machine interface design: information characteristics (availability, access, readability, currency, accuracy and meaningfulness); workspace arrangement; workloads, procedures; environments; and training. As owners of ships and maritime systems struggle to reduce operating costs, they need to investigate techniques to reduce human error rates, training burdens, and manning requirements. More and more owners are opting to reduce manning levels for future ships and systems. The benefit of manpower reduction is significant cost savings in operating ships and maritime systems. The downside is the potential for increasing the incidence of human error. What is needed is a way to reduce the incidence and impact of human errors in ships and maritime systems where manning levels are being significantly reduced. The U.S. Navy's human systems integration (HSI) approach to ship and system design provides a solution to this problem. HSI is the systems engineering discipline specifically directed at prevention and control of human error. HSI emphasizes human-centered design of human machine systems as well as design of jobs, organizations, workplaces, procedures and environments to reduce human error potential, make systems error tolerant, and reduce workloads of remaining personnel in a reduced manning ship or system. The HSI process for preventing and controlling human errors involves a series of steps which span the systems engineering process. These steps include: (1) analysis of human-automation interaction; (2) human error likelihood analysis; (3) modeling and simulation of error modes (4) development test & evaluation; (5) risk assessment; (6) human-machine interface analysis error analysis; (7) operational test & evaluation; (8) error data collection and lessons learned database; and (9) error tolerance monitoring.