The Role of Human Factors in System Safety Analyses

A system is typically defined as a combination of people, procedures and equipment, but many safety analyses focus just on the equipment part. Even safety standards, e.g. IEC 61508, hardly cover human factors. One reason could be that most of the common safety tools can only be applied to hardware, some of them also to software, but they often neglect the human factors. Successful system safety cannot be addressed without this important contributor. The human factors engineering discipline needs to become an integrated part of system safety analyses. The speaker presents some practical examples of the non-fulfilment of this requirement together with the related consequences, and he also discusses some practical improvements of the current situation.