The Need to Consider the Complexity of Human Behaviour when Engineering Technical Systems for Risk Prevention

Abstract

Safety science pursues the aim of preventing or reducing as much as possible damage caused by hazards, on a methodical and systematic basis. An important part of this is safety engineering, which deals with the hazards of socio-technical systems. Safety engineering has successfully established itself and differentiated into many fields. All areas of our lives involve questions of hazards, so safety science and safety engineering must continually develop in the course of time. Each dangerous situation has its special and general characteristics. The human factor is a general subject and plays an important role in virtually all hazards and is decisive for the functioning of socio-technical systems. In previous eras, hazards by technical systems were frequently the result of failure of materials or components. The majority of safety problems in the current situation are related to human beings. This is not due to the deficiency of human beings, however, but is rather a result of ignoring the complexity of their behaviour in the engineering of (technical) systems. This situation is explained in the present article on the basis of studies dealing with the cause-analysis of hazards in the context of different technical systems.