Safety and Security in Transportation Process - Not Just Technical Issue

Abstract

Security these days is global in dimension. It covers issues as climate change, health and the fight against terrorism. The most important components of transportation processes are safety and security of the process and the most important factor for process safety/security is a human factor. Major accidents in transportation process have been attributed to human factor and surprisingly, a human factor is the most poorly investigated aspect of the transportation safety/security process. Improving the human factors design of a process can produce not only improvements in safety, security and health but also gains in quality and productivity in transportation process. Human errors are regarded as one of the main causes for railway accidents these days. In spite of this fact, the consideration of human error probabilities in quantified risk analyses has been very rudimentary. A lack of comprehensive data and analyses lead to the use of estimations and values from other industries. This paper discusses the transferability of human error probabilities for railways and identifies problems in handling methods and values for analysis the security issues concerning any undesirable human behavior and its influence on safety and security of transportation process. The Markov model presented is one proposed solution to the problem. It takes into account both the positive and the negative human impact of violations.