Recording and Evaluation of Human Factor Events with a View to System Awareness and Ergonomic Weak Points within the System, at the Example of Commercial Aeronautics

Abstract

The risk for human errors is particularly high, if a person has not considered enough information about his situation. This consideration of information also can be described as situation awareness. It will become dangerous, if a person assesses his awareness higher as it is actual. This discrepancy between subjective and actual situation awareness can be found out at almost all Human Factor (HF) Events. With the examination of the situation awareness, the event analysis is carried out consistently from the point of view of the man. By this concept, HF Events can be examined even more on ergonomic aspects. It is however necessary that reports about HF Events provide sufficient information about the situation awareness. For this a computer-based event analysis scheme is used to report events interactively. With this software, we currently investigate how it is possible to create uniform and comparable event reports. The complete event is divided up into sub-events and is described using the Man Machine System framework. The demarcation of the sub-events is mainly made by allocation of the persons involved. This human and system related view also allows describing the situation awareness of this person and provides data for the later analysis of the situation awareness.