• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.19-29
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• 2014

Korean societal concern for the train accidents is fast and widely increasing with an ever-increasing demand and use for KTX. Most of these train accidents are inclined to be caused by human error. Experts used to attribute the causes of human error to the defects in various aspects such as technology, organizational system, practices, corporate culture, and/or human resource itself. Among the diverse causes of human error, an important one, even though it was rarely focused, may be the issue of impact of rule or procedure change on human error. Giving attention to the implicit importance of this issue, this study intends to highlight the theme of frequent procedure change in railway driving manual as a critical factor of human error. To attain this purpose mentioned above, dual methodologies were adopted. One is to qualitatively analyze the real cases of procedure change in relevant manuals followed by the incident case(passing the station scheduled to stop) happened lately. Another is to quantitatively perform statistical analysis based on questionnaires received from 224 train drivers. Results show that frequent changes in internal affairs procedure is or may be an important factor causing stress and human error from train drivers.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.64-73
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• 2020

As Korean government and safety-related organizations make continuous efforts to reduce the number of industrial accidents, accident rate has steadily declined since 2010, thereby recording 0.48% in 2017. However, the number of fatalities due to industrial accidents was 1,987 in 2017, which means that more efforts should be made to reduce the number of industrial accidents. As an essential activity for enhancing the system safety, accident analysis can be effectively used for reducing the number of industrial accidents. Accident analysis aims to understand the process of an accident scenario and to identify the plausible causes of the accident. Accident analysis offers useful information for developing measures for preventing the recurrence of an accident or its similar accidents. However, it seems that the current practice of accident analysis in Korean manufacturing companies takes a simplistic accident model, which is based on a linear and deterministic cause-effect relation. Considering the actual complexities underlying accidents, this would be problematic; it could be more significant in the case of human error-related accidents. Accordingly, it is necessary to use a more elaborated accident model for addressing the complexity and nature of human-error related accidents more systematically. Regarding this, HFACS(Human Factors Analysis and Classification System) can be a viable accident analysis method. It is based on the Swiss cheese model and offers a range of causal factors of a human error-related accident, some of which can be judged as the plausible causes of an accident. HFACS has been widely used in several work domains(e.g. aviation and rail industry) and can be effectively used in Korean industries. However, as HFACS was originally developed in aviation industry, the taxonomy of causal factors may not be easily applied to accidents in Korean industries, particularly manufacturing companies. In addition, the typical characteristics of Korean industries need to be reflected as well. With this issue in mind, we developed HFACS-K as a method for analyzing accidents happening in Korean industries. This paper reports the process of developing HFACS-K, the structure and contents of HFACS-K, and a case study for demonstrating its usefulness.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.195-200
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• 2014

Occupational fatal injury rate per 10,000 population of Korea is still higher among the OECD member countries. To prevent fatal injuries, the causes of accidents including human error should be analyzed and then appropriate countermeasures should be established. There was an severe converter furnace accident resulting in five people death by chocking in 2013. Although the accident type of the furnace accident was suffocation, many safety problems were included before reaching the death of suffocation. If the safety problems are reviewed throughly, the alternative measures based on the review would be very useful in preventing similar accidents. In this study, we investigated the converter furnace accident by using human error analysis and accident scenario analysis. As a result, it was found that the accident was caused by some human errors, inappropriate task sequence and lack of control in coordinating work by several subordinating companies. From the review of this case, the followings are suggested: First, systematic human error analysis should be included in the investigation of fatal injury accidents. Second, multi man-machine accident scenario analyis is useful in most of coordinating work. Third, the more provision of information on system state will lessen human errors. Fourth, the coordinating control in safety should be performed in the work conducting by several different companies.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.79-84
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• 2014

Human error is one of the major contributors to the accidents. A lot of risk assessment techniques have been developed for prevention of accidents. Nevertheless, most of them were interested in physical factors, because quantitative evaluation of human errors was difficult quantitatively. According to lack of risk assessment techniques about human errors, most of industrial risk assessment for human errors were based on data of accident analysis. In order to develop an effective countermeasure to reduce the risk caused by human errors, a systematic analysis is needed. Generally, risk assessment system is composed of 5 step(classification of work activity, identification of hazards, risk estimation, evaluation and improvement). This study aimed to develop a risk identification technique for human errors that could mainly be applied to industrial fields. In this study, Ergo-HAZOP and Comprehensive Human Error Analysis Technique were used for developing the risk identification technique. In the proposed risk identification technique, Ergo-HAZOP was used for broad-brush risk identification. More critical risks were analysed by Comprehensive Human Error Analysis Technique. In order to verify applicability, the proposed risk identification technique was applied to the work of pile head cutting. As a consequence, extensive hazards were identified and fundamental countermeasures were established. It is expected that much attention would be paid to prevent accidents by human error in industrial fields since safety personnel can easily fint out hazards of human factors if utilizing the proposed risk identification technique.

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.43-52
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• 2008

Human errors are now considered as the most significant source of accidents or incidents in large-scale systems such as aircraft, vessels, railway, and nuclear power plants. As 61% of the train accidents in Korea railway involving collisions, derailments and fires were caused by human errors, there is a strong need for a systematic research that can help to prevent human errors. Although domestic railway operating companies use a variety of methods for analyzing human errors, there is much room for improvement. Especially, because most of them are based on written papers, there is a definite need for a well-developed computerized system supporting human error analyzing tasks. The purpose of this study is to propose a framework for a computerized human error analysis system focused on the railway industry on the basis of human error analysis mechanism. The proposed framework consists of human error analysis (HEA) module, similar accident tracking (SAT) module, cause factor recommendation (CFR) module, cause factor management (CFM) module, and statistics (ST) module.

• Journal of Wellbeing Management and Applied Psychology
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.35-41
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• 2024

Purpose: This study examines the persistent occurrence of railway accidents despite numerous safety devices, highlighting the multifaceted nature of these incidents. Research design, data and methodology: Utilizing the 4M analysis method, the research investigates a decade's worth of accident reported from the Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board to identify risk factors and suggest mitigation measures. Results: The analysis reveals that 57% of railway accidents are attributed to human factors, followed by mechanical (28%), environmental (7%), and management (8%) factors. Conclusions: The study underscores the necessity of prioritizing safety and establishing a unified organizational approach to prevent human error accidents. It calls for an alignment of risk perception between headquarters and field operations, advocating for educational and perceptual changes, as well as systematic improvements to achieve safety goals.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Navigation and Port Research Conference
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• 2019.11a
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• pp.265-265
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• 2019

Marine accidents continue to occur every year due to human errors. The purpose of this study is to promote navigational safety by preventing ship collision accidents caused by human errors of behavior of navigators. There are two ways to manage human error caused by navigator's behavior. It is divided in individual approach and system approach, which is applied to situational awareness theory and Rasmussen's behavioral theory. This study investigated past marine accidents caused by human error and conducted experiments using ship handling simulators to identify these two behavioral characteristics. After analyzing two human error characteristics, we will propose a countermeasure in next study.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Navigation and Port Research Conference
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• 2004.08a
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• pp.139-145
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• 2004

It is well known that human errors is involved in most of maritime accidents. For the purpose of reducing the influence of human elements on maritime activities, it is necessary to identify the human unsafe acts in those activities. The commonly used methods in identification of human unsafe acts are maritime accident statistics or case analysis. With the statistics data, people could roughly identify what kinds of unsafe acts or human errors have played active role in the accident, however, they often neglected some active unsafe acts while overestimated some mini-unsafe acts because of the inherent shortcoming of the methods. There should be some more accurate approaches for human error identification in maritime accidents. In this paper, the application of technique called grey relational analysis (GRA) into the identification of human unsafe acts is presented. GRA is used to examine the extent of connections between two digits by applying the, methodology of departing and scattering measurement to actual distance measurement. Based on the statistics data of maritime accidents occurred in Chinese waters in last 10years, the relationship between the happening times of maritime accidents and that of unsafe acts are established with GRA. In accordance with the value of grey relational grade, the identified main human unsafe acts involved in maritime accidents are ranked in following orders: improper lookout, improper use of radar and equivalent equipment, error of judgment, act not in time, improper communication, improper shiphandling, use of unsafe speed, violating the rule and ignorance of good seamanship. The result shows that GRA is an effective and practical technique in improving the accuracy of human unsafe acts identification.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aviation and Aeronautics
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.77-86
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• 2018

Stress is the main source of a human error or can potentially contribute to it. Recently, the rate of accidents which is associated with human factors among the total aircraft accidents is showing a tendency of gradual increase. In order to prevent the accidents related to human factors, stress mitigation of the mission personnel is highly required. In this study, a 'stress cognitive alteration' technique, which is one of the stress relief methods, is applied to the Air Force pilots to verify if the technique is effective in reducing stress. The 'stress cognitive alteration' technique is comprised of two parts: a positive function of stress and a process to positively alter the physical, psychological response to stress. As a result of the application, it is found that this technique has an effect of reducing stress of the pilots under a relatively high level of stress.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.11 no.2 s.35
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• pp.60-64
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• 2007

Chemical Process industry in Korea has over 30 year's of history and is likely to face potential incidents. The traditional risk analysis and control system in Chemical Process industry focuses on mechanical defects, overlooking the human performance control. Although development of automation technology and controlling technology was necessary, human decision factor is essential to preventing accidents in the Chemical Process. Almost all serious accidents take place when inappropriate humanperformance and mechanical defects of safety equipments simultaneously occurs. The AHRA(Advanced Human Reliability Analyzer) software has been developed to collect failure data and analyze human error probability (Reliability) in Chemical Process Industry in Korea. This paper describes the HRA analysis result of PIF(Performance Influencing Factor) evaluation, HEP(Human Error Probability) and root cause of accidents by applying a Chemical Process Industry related accident data. This analysis result should present a scheme that, by controlling human error factor other than putting safety management funds into the machinery in plants, can reduce cost and maximize the safety in Chemical Process Industry.