Title: Methodological Approach for Performing Human Reliability and Error Analysis in Railway Transportation System
Abstract: Today, billions of dollars are being spent annually world wide to develop, manufacture, and operate transportation system such trains, ships, aircraft, and motor vehicles. Around 70 to 90 percent of transportation crashes are, directly or indirectly, the result of error. In fact, with the development of technology, system reliability has increased dramatically during the past decades, while reliability has remained unchanged over the same period. Accordingly, error is now considered as the most significant source of accidents or incidents in safety-critical systems. The aim of the paper is the proposal of a methodological approach to improve the transportation system reliability and in particular railway transportation system. The methodology presented is based on Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) and Human Reliability Analysis (HRA). Keyword-Human Error, Incidents, HRA, FMECA, Railway, Transportation I. INTRODUCTION The safety of staff, customers and of the general public in general viewed as one of the most important requirements in industry and is of particular importance in the railway industry, where passenger rightly expert vary high standards of care. Identifying the errors that frequently result in the occurrence of rail incidents and accidents can lead to the development of appropriate prevention and/or mitigation strategies. There is little doubt that error contributes to the majority of incidents and accidents which occur within complex systems, including the railway system (1, 2). To prevent and/or reduce the number of accidents and incidents which occur we must work towards reducing error or making the system/organisation more error tolerant. Human error and accident management involves the prevention of errors, the recovery from errors, and the containment of the consequences that result from error occurrence (3). The first step in this process is error identification. Identifying the errors that frequently result in the occurrence of incidents and accidents may allow appropriate prevention and/or mitigation strategies to be developed. We note that the objective difficulties of governing the factor and the error, have made many experts believe that the conduct of preventive and safety were related to intrinsic characteristics of the person, as the traits of personality. Another explanation of the phenomenon credited accident is based, on the contrary, on the search for extrinsic causes, such as research productivity. In other words, the accident can be determined on one side by unsafe behaviour and on the other, by structural conditions and inadequate instrumentation technique. From this point of view several methods have been developed to control the behaviour of safety or methods for safety management based on better behaviour critical to the safety of workers with the aim to drastically reduce accidents For risk analysis have been developed several techniques including: Safety Review, Checklist Analysis, Relative Ranking, What-if Analysis, Preliminary Hazard Analysis, Hazard and Operability (HAZOP), Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA), Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), Event Tree Analysis (ETA), Cause-Consequence Analysis (CCA). In particular in our work we will analyse: • The Human Reliability Analysis (HRA), a recently spread method which focuses its attention on the responsibility of the human factor; • The Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA), methodology designed to identify potential failure modes for a product or process, to assess the risk associated with those failure modes, to rank the issues in terms of importance and to identify and carry out corrective actions to address the most serious concerns. It is evident that the inherent complexity of the study of factors requires the implementation of multi- criteria approach. The aim of this work is to develop a methodological approach to improve the reliability of transportation system and in particular of railway transportation system starting from identification of possible sources of risk and through the integration of HRA and FMECA (4). The paper is structured in the following
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 55
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