Introduction to Human Factors and System Safety

Introduction to Human Factors and System Safety

Introduction

The Introduction to Human Factors and System Safety course will provide delegates with a general appreciation of safety engineering issues in the context of a typical systems development life-cycle.

Human Factors are often cited as the cause of hazards within safety-related
systems; yet system safety cases often contain no mention of them.

Conversely, system operators or users often provide substantial mitigation
between hazards and their associated accidents; yet this is also often overlooked. If human factors risks are not considered, a system will not achieve the required level of integrity.

If human factors mitigations are not considered, the technical system
components may be over engineered at additional cost to achieve a target
level of safety.

Course Content:

• Session 1 - Human Factors and System Safety
• Session 2 - Human Factors - Definition and Scope
• Session 3 - Human Error cases
• Session 4 - Analysing Human Behaviour
• Session 5 - Human factors Exercise:
  • BBC Video - Fatal Error (30min)
  • Causal Factors and Accident Barriers (30min).
• Session 6 - Q&A.

Objectives

A Training Objective (TO) is a precise statement of the skills and knowledge
required of a trainee at the end of a training Session.

The course aimed at providing engineers and project managers in a range of
sectors (e.g. Defence, Aerospace, Rail etc.) with an appreciation of the human
factors and ergonomics issues relating to safe systems development.

This course will provide an introduction to the Human Factors discipline along
with an overview of the scope of human factors analyses in the context of
safety-related systems engineering. Attendees will also get an overview of the
tools and techniques required for designing safer systems and exercises will
provide participants with consolidation of the theory presented.

At the end the course, participants will not be human factors specialists;
however, the aim is that they will have a better understanding of how to achieve
safer human factors designs and better plan for human factors integration within
a safety-related systems development programme.