Anticipating Failures: What Should Predictions Be About?

Abstract

Accident analysis and performance predictions have traditionally been pursued in separate ways, using different concepts and methds. This has made it difficult to use the experiences from accident analysis in performance prediction. As a resuli, performance prediction is still focused on the concept of individual "errors", despite overwhelming evidence that accidents are caused by a concatenation of conditions rather than a single action failure. It is argued that the anticipation of failures should be based on better models of how periormance conditions determine actions, and that the inherent van ability - or unreliability - of human performance is the noise rather than the signal.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2001
Accession Number
ADP010439

Entities

People

  • Erik Hollnagel

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accidents
  • Cognition
  • Cognitive Systems Engineering
  • Complex Systems
  • Engineering
  • Error Analysis
  • Errors
  • Failure Mode And Effect Analysis
  • Human Systems Integration
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Human-Machine Interaction
  • Human-Machine Systems
  • Information Processing
  • Information Systems
  • Motor Skills
  • Risk
  • Systems Engineering

Readers

  • Aviation Safety Risk Assessment.
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Systems Analysis and Design