Understanding safety and production risks in rail engineering planning and protection

摘要

Much of the published human factors work on risk is to do with safety and within this is concerned with predictionand analysis of human error and with human reliability assessment. Less has been published on human factorscontributions to understanding and managing project, business, engineering and other forms of risk and still lessjointly assessing risk to do with broad issues of ‘safety’ and broad issues of ‘production’ or ‘performance’. This papercontains a general commentary on human factors and assessment of risk of various kinds, in the context of the aimsof ergonomics and concerns about being too risk averse. The paper then describes a specific project, in railengineering, where the notion of a human factors case has been employed to analyse engineering functions andrelated human factors issues. A human factors issues register for potential system disturbances has been developed,prior to a human factors risk assessment, which jointly covers safety and production (engineering delivery) concerns.The paper concludes with a commentary on the potential relevance of a resilience engineering perspective tounderstanding rail engineering systems risk. Design, planning and management of complex systems will increasinglyhave to address the issue of making trade-offs between safety and production, and ergonomics should be central to this.The paper addresses the relevant issues and does so in an under-published domain – rail systems engineering work.