Safety-critical Tasks Research Articles

A Better Way to Train Personnel to Be Safe in Emergencies

Offshore petroleum platforms present complex, time-sensitive situations that can make emergency evacuations difficult to manage. Virtual environments (VE) can train safety-critical tasks and help prepare personnel to respond to real-world offshore emergencies. Before industries can adopt VE training, its utility must be established to ensure the technology provides effective training. This paper presents the results of two experiments that investigated the training utility of VE training. The experiments focused particularly on determining the most appropriate method to deliver offshore emergency egress training using a virtual environment. The first experiment used lecture-based teaching (LBT). The second experiment investigated the utility of a simulation-based mastery learning (SBML) pedagogical method from the medical field to address offshore emergency egress training. Both training programs (LBT and SBML) were used to train naïve participants in basic onboard familiarization and emergency evacuation procedures. This paper discusses the training efficacy of the SBML method in this context and compares the results of the SBML experimental study to the results of the LBT training experiment. Efficacy of the training methods is measured by a combination of time spent training and performance achieved by each of the training groups. Results show that the SBML approach to VE training was more time effective and produced better performance in the emergency scenarios. SBML training can help address individual variability in competence. Limitations to the SBML training are discussed and recommendations to improve the delivery of SBML training are presented. Overall, the results indicate that employing SBML training in industry can improve human reliability during emergencies through increased competence and compliance.

Improving barrier effectiveness using human factors methods

The Process Industry has an established practice of identifying barriers to credit as IPLs (Independent protection layers) through the use of methods such as PHA (Process Hazard Analysis) and LOPA (Layer of Protection Analysis) type studies. However, the validation of IPLs and barriers to ensure their effectiveness especially related to human and organizational factors is lagging.The concept of barriers as discrete onion layers comprised of administrative controls, alarms, instruments, mechanical devices, and post-release mitigation is highly idealized. The focus has been primarily on hardware reliability over human reliability. This model is misleading because it blinds us to the reality that all barriers are fundamentally human. This human influence is made up of small groups of people, comprised of operations, maintenance, and technical staff, with a management layer. Many catastrophic incidents arise in industry due to human and organizational failures related to barriers. The methods of PHA and LOPA as currently practiced are not addressing this issue. There is not even awareness of this issue, because tools such as LOPA depend on assumptions (for example, independence) that creates over confidence in the results.A different way of thinking about barriers is needed. Additional tools to validate barriers from a human factors perspective are required. Fortunately, this thinking and these tools already exist. For example, safety critical task analysis, new accident models, human reliability assessments, and insight from the field of behavioral economics are available to help improve human performance related to barriers. These are the subject of this paper.The methods and tools described in this paper have not been widely adopted in the Process Industry and so there exists a competency gap related to their use.

Application-Specific Tailoring of Multi-Core SoCs for Real-Time Systems with Diverse Predictability Demands

Embedded multi-core processors improve performance significantly and are desirable in many application-fields. This development, in particular, includes safety-critical real-time systems, which typically require a deterministic temporal behavior. However, even tasks without dependencies running on different cores can interfere due to, sometimes hidden, shared hardware resources, such as memory or communication buses. Consequently, only a pessimistic assumption of the worst-case execution time (WCET) that incorporates interference can be given. The desired performance gain therefore evaporates in the poor temporal analyzability. Safety-critical real-time systems are typically composed of multiple tasks with varying criticality levels and requirements on predictability and performance, respectively. In this paper, we present an approach that generates an application-specific, deterministic multi-core architecture for such mix-critical systems, thus eliminating the aforementioned hardware-induced interferences in the first place. Safety-critical tasks with stringent temporal requirements are mapped to dedicated Deterministic Execution Units (DEUs) while the remaining soft real-time tasks co-reside on a general purpose multi-core processor that offers performance over determinism. Just as well, predictable interconnections between DEUs are generated to satisfy dependencies and precedence constraints. Consequently, timing analysis for hard real-time tasks is significantly simplified, since interferences caused by shared resources and scheduling are finally eliminated. To show the benefits of our approach, an application-specific architecture for a flight controller was generated and compared to an ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core as a reference. Overall, we were able to significantly improve temporal properties of safety-critical tasks while preserving the overall performance for soft real-time tasks.

P048: Interprofessional airway microskill checklists facilitate the deliberate practice of surgical cricothyrotomy with 3-D printed surgical airway trainers

Introduction: Deliberate practice (DP) is the evolution of practice using continually challenging and focused practice on a particular task. DP involves immediate feedback, time for problem-solving and evaluation, and opportunities for repeated performance. Microskills training breaks down larger tasks into multiple smaller subtasks and then adds opportunities for feedback and adjustment for each subtask. Microskills training is routinely used to achieve excellence in competitive sports, martial arts, military operations, and music. Surgical cricothyrotomy is a rarely performed safety critical task. Methods: Two doctors and three nurses developed stepwise team microskills checklists from case review, simulations and published evidence. The checklist was tested, evaluated and developed during four days of simulation faculty team training. The final 30 item checklist was used to facilitate skills training for doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists and ACPs in one level 2, and two level 3 trauma centers from April 2017 to October 2017. Commonly available airway trainers were retrofitted with the 3-D printed larynx. The microskills checklist was used in four phases: 1. Group discussion of each microskill step; 2. Groups of three team members; operator, assistant and microskill facilitator (using the checklist) to enable the deliberate analysis of the teams current performance. Each subtask is performed with immediate peer and where necessary faculty feedback - changes are recorded; 3. Total task run through without interruption - changes are recorded; 4. Repetition and feedback using different team members, manikins, including time pressure. User satisfaction surveys were collected after the skills training session Results: Teams were composed of Registered Nurses (8), Physicians (9), and Respiratory Therapists (2). All of the teams experienced a change in practice. The median number of microskills changed for MDs 12/21, RNs 6/12. The commonest changes in practice were equipment preparation (all teams). All professions agreed strongly that the approach produces a positive change in practice (median score 5/5). Conclusion: Microskills checklists facilitate cricothyrotomy skill development in interprofessional teams in this provisional analysis.

Human–Machine Collaboration Modalities for Semi-Automated Needle Insertion Into Soft Tissue

Needle insertion is a minimally invasive medical procedure commonly used for biopsy, ablation, or deposition of therapeutic agents. In prostate brachytherapy, needles are inserted into the prostate in order to deposit multiple rice-grain-sized radioactive seeds to eradicate cancerous tissue from close proximity. During insertion, the needles should remain on a straight path, such that the seeds are deposited according to their preplanned location. The needles, however, due to their beveled tip, deflect from the straight path. In order to guide the needle back toward the straight path, the surgeon may manually rotate the needle axially or apply lateral force onto the needle near its entry point into tissue. To aid the surgeon with steering the needle more accurately toward the desired target, we propose robotic assistance where the responsibilities are assigned between the surgeon and the machine in such a way that safety is guaranteed while achieving high steering accuracy. Thus, in this work, a human-in-the-loop collaborative robotic assistant system is proposed where the aforementioned steering actions are carried out autonomously by the robotic assistant system. This collaboration modality is in agreement with safety requirements as the surgeon remains in the loop and is in charge of the most safety-critical task, which is the needle insertion itself. It is shown experimentally that using both steering commands from the machine as the surgeon inserts the needle satisfactorily achieves the goal of minimizing needle deflection with high accuracy.

A Survey of Cooperative Driving between Auxiliary Autonomous System and Human Driver

The cooperative driving is a main direction of intelligent vehicle development since safety-critical tasks must be executed by human and autonomous system. An intelligent vehicle is equipped with a full range of sensors, which are larger and faster than the perception and computational ability of a human driver, while the latter has a comprehensive ability to adapt to unexpected events. According to their respective advantages, the cooperative driving between human and autonomous system can have new synergies. The emphasis of this paper is to survey the current state of the art of cooperative driving, with a specific focus on decision-making and motion planning levels and correlative algorithms. Such researches enable the autonomous system to compensate the human driver in dangerous or uncomfortable circumstance. This paper provides insights into the scope of decision-making and motion planning for cooperative driving, as well as the shortcomings and tendencies.

Co-Scheduling Persistent Periodic and Dynamic Aperiodic Real-Time Tasks on Reconfigurable Platforms

As task preemption/relocation with acceptably low overheads become a reality in today's reconfigurable FPGAs, they are starting to show bright prospects as platforms for executing performance critical task sets while allowing high resource utilization. Many performance sensitive real-time systems including those in automotive and avionics systems, chemical reactors, etc., often execute a set of persistent periodic safety critical control tasks along with dynamic event driven aperiodic tasks. This work presents a co-scheduling framework for the combined execution of such periodic and aperiodic real-time tasks on fully and run-time partially reconfigurable platforms. Specifically, we present an admission control strategy and preemptive scheduling methodology for dynamic aperiodic tasks in the presence of a set of persistent periodic tasks such that aperiodic task rejections may be minimized, thus resulting in high resource utilization. We used the 2D slotted area model where the floor of the FPGA is assumed to be statically equipartitioned into a set of tiles in which any arbitrary task may be feasibly mapped. The experimental results reveal that the proposed scheduling strategies are able to achieve high resource utilization with low task rejection rates over various simulation scenarios.

Pilot Implementation of Human-Centered Model in Disaster Management: A Report From Landslides Area in Semarang City

Semarang has a high potential of landslides occurrences in its almost area that should be noted by the stakeholders. Consider this fact, human as the part of the system should be used as a center of the disaster management system to reduce the risk caused by the disaster. An adapted model of human factor toolkits is developed to represent a specific phase of human-centered disaster management. This model presents four phases including major disaster scenario, human error analysis, safety critical task and performance influence factors (PIFs). As the preliminary implementation, this study takes the pilot implementation of each phase of the model to examine the reliability of the concept in the landslide cases, especially in Semarang city. The result shows that there is quite a high deviation between expected and observed behavior of the community and the government institution regarding the awareness states of the system.

Investigating the Feasibility of Vehicle Telemetry Data as a Means of Predicting Driver Workload

Driving is a safety critical task that requires a high level of attention from the driver. Although drivers have limited attentional resources, they often perform secondary tasks such as eating or using a mobile phone. When performing multiple tasks in the vehicle, the driver can become overloaded and the risk of a crash is increased. If a vehicle is aware that the driver is currently under high workload, the vehicle functionality can be changed in order to minimise any further demand. Traditionally, workload is measured using physiological sensors that require often intrusive and expensive equipment. Another approach may be to use vehicle telemetry data as a performance measure for workload. In this paper, the authors present the Warwick-JLR Driver Monitoring Dataset (DMD) and analyse it to investigate the feasibility of using vehicle telemetry data for determining the driver workload. They perform a statistical analysis of subjective ratings, physiological data, and vehicle telemetry data collected during a track study. A data mining methodology is then presented to build predictive models using this data, for the driver workload monitoring problem.

From road distraction to safe driving: Evaluating the effects of boredom and gamification on driving behaviour, physiological arousal, and subjective experience

Boredom and low levels of task engagement while driving can pose road safety risks, e.g., inattention during low traffic, routine trips, or semi-automated driving. Digital technology interventions that increase task engagement, e.g., through performance feedback, increased challenge, and incentives (often referred to as ‘gamification’), could therefore offer safety benefits. To explore the impact of such interventions, we conducted experiments in a high-fidelity driving simulator with thirty-two participants. In two counterbalanced conditions (control and intervention), we compared driving behaviour, physiological arousal, and subjective experience. Results indicate that the gamified boredom intervention reduced unsafe coping mechanisms such as speeding while promoting anticipatory driving. We can further infer that the intervention not only increased one's attention and arousal during the intermittent gamification challenges, but that these intermittent stimuli may also help sustain one's attention and arousal in between challenges and throughout a drive. At the same time, the gamified condition led to slower hazard reactions and short off-road glances. Our contributions deepen our understanding of driver boredom and pave the way for engaging interventions for safety critical tasks.

Applying Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to choose a human factors technique: Choosing the suitable Human Reliability Analysis technique for the automotive industry

The increasing level of automation and complexity in the automotive industry has led to the establishment of a work environment, where human machine interface and human reliability are becoming critical factors of performance especially for safety critical tasks. Many different methodologies for performing risk assessment considering human factors are already available in the literature, but they were often developed for domains other than the automotive industry (aviation, nuclear and process industry). Their purpose is to support the root cause evaluation and estimate the probability of faulty human actions. The present paper introduces a method to support the evaluation and the choice of a suitable Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) technique for the automotive sector considering the ones proposed from other industrial domains. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) provides a way of assisting safety managers and risk assessors in the HRA technique selection process. This allows the selected HRA techniques to be evaluated based on relevant criteria for an application in an automotive manufacturing environment. An example of selected HRA techniques in this paper will be demonstrated in a case study. The example can also suggest implications to improve existing industry guidelines, international standards and regulations, which are frequently calling for a wide range of ergonomic factors to be considered in the risk assessment process. Further the case study should show potential benefits to organizations coming from the selection and application of the right HRA technique.

Evaluation of the Display of Cognitive State Feedback to Drive Adaptive Task Sharing.

This paper presents an adaptive system intended to address workload imbalances between pilots in future flight decks. Team performance can be maximized when task demands are balanced within crew capabilities and resources. Good communication skills enable teams to adapt to changes in workload, and include the balancing of workload between team members This work addresses human factors priorities in the aviation domain with the goal to develop concepts that balance operator workload, support future operator roles and responsibilities, and support new task requirements, while allowing operators to focus on the most safety critical tasks. A traditional closed-loop adaptive system includes the decision logic to turn automated adaptations on and off. This work takes a novel approach of replacing the decision logic, normally performed by the automation, with human decisions. The Crew Workload Manager (CWLM) was developed to objectively display the workload between pilots and recommend task sharing; it is then the pilots who “close the loop” by deciding how to best mitigate unbalanced workload. The workload was manipulated by the Shared Aviation Task Battery (SAT-B), which was developed to provide opportunities for pilots to mitigate imbalances in workload between crew members. Participants were put in situations of high and low workload (i.e., workload was manipulated as opposed to being measured), the workload was then displayed to pilots, and pilots were allowed to decide how to mitigate the situation. An evaluation was performed that utilized the SAT-B to manipulate workload and create workload imbalances. Overall, the CWLM reduced the time spent in unbalanced workload and improved the crew coordination in task sharing while not negatively impacting concurrent task performance. Balancing workload has the potential to improve crew resource management and task performance over time, and reduce errors and fatigue. Paired with a real-time workload measurement system, the CWLM could help teams manage their own task load distribution.

An imperfect maintenance policy for mission-oriented systems subject to degradation and external shocks

This paper develops a maintenance model for mission-oriented systems subject to natural degradation and external shocks. For mission-oriented systems which are used to perform safety-critical tasks, maintenance actions need to satisfy a range of constraints such as availability/reliability, maintenance duration and the opportunity of maintenance. Additionally, in developing maintenance policy, one needs to consider the natural degradation due to aging and wearing along with the external shocks due to variations of the operating environment. In this paper, the natural degradation is modeled as a Wiener process and the arrival of random shock as a homogeneous Poisson process. The damage caused by shocks is integrated into the degradation process, according to the cumulative shock model. Improvement factor model is used to characterize the impact of maintenance actions on system restoration. Optimal maintenance policy is obtained by minimizing the long-run cost rate. Finally, an example of subsea blowout preventer system is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Fault-Tolerant Task Scheduling for Mixed-Criticality Real-Time Systems

Integration of safety-critical tasks with different certification requirements onto a common hardware platform has become a growing tendency in the design of real-time and embedded systems. In the past decade, great efforts have been made to develop techniques for handling uncertainties in task worst-case execution time, quality-of-service, and schedulability of mixed-criticality systems. However, few works take fault-tolerance as a design requirement. In this paper, we address the scheduling of fault-tolerant mixed-criticality systems to ensure the safety of tasks at different levels of criticalities in the presence of transient faults. We adopt task re-execution as the fault-tolerant technique. Extensive simulations were performed to validate the effectiveness of our algorithm. Simulation results show that our algorithm results in up to [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] improvement in system reliability and schedule feasibility as compared to existing techniques, which contributes to a more safe system.

A low-cost and high performance navigation system for small RPAS applications

Modern Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) employ a variety of sensors and multi-sensor data fusion techniques to provide advanced functionalities and trusted autonomy in a wide range of mission-essential and safety-critical tasks. In particular, Navigation and Guidance Systems (NGS) for small RPAS require a typical combination of lightweight, compact and inexpensive sensors to satisfy the Required Navigation Performance (RNP) in all flight phases. In this paper, the synergies attainable by the combination of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), Micro-Electromechanical System based Inertial Measurement Unit (MEMS-IMU) and Vision-Based Navigation (VBN) sensors are explored. In case of VBN, an appearance-based navigation technique is adopted and feature extraction/optical flow methods are employed to estimate the navigation parameters during precision approach and landing phases. A key novelty of the proposed approach is the employment of Aircraft Dynamics Models (ADM) augmentation to compensate for the shortcomings of VBN and MEMS-IMU sensors in high-dynamics attitude determination tasks. To obtain the best estimates of Position, Velocity and Attitude (PVA), different sensor combinations are analysed and dynamic Boolean Decision Logics (BDL) are implemented for data selection before the centralised data fusion is accomplished. Various alternatives for data fusion are investigated including a traditional Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) and a more advanced Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF). A novel hybrid controller employing fuzzy logic and Proportional–Integral–Derivative (PID) techniques is implemented to provide effective stabilisation and control of pitch and roll angles. After introducing the key mathematical models describing the three NGS architectures: EKF based VBN-IMU-GNSS (VIG) and VBN-IMU-GNSS-ADM (VIGA) and UKF based Enhanced VIGA (EVIGA), the system performances are compared in a small RPAS integration scheme (i.e., AEROSONDE RPAS platform) exploring a representative cross-section of the aircraft operational flight envelope. A dedicated ADM processor (i.e., a local pre-filter) is adopted in the EVIGA architecture to account for the RPAS manoeuvring envelope in different flight phases (assisted by a manoeuvre identification algorithm), in order to extend the ADM validity time across all segments of the RPAS trajectory. Simulation results show that the VIG, VIGA and EVIGA systems are compliant with ICAO requirements for precision approach down to CAT-II. In all other flight phases, the VIGA system shows improvement in PVA data output with respect to the VIG system. The EVIGA system shows the best performance in terms of attitude data accuracy and a significant extension of the ADM validity time is achieved in this configuration.

Cognitive pilot-aircraft interface for single-pilot operations

Considering the foreseen expansion of the air transportation system within the next two decades and the opportunities offered by higher levels of automation, Single-Pilot Operations (SPO) are regarded as viable alternatives to conventional two-pilot operations for commercial transport aircraft. In comparison with current operations, SPO require higher cognitive efforts, which potentially result in increased human error rates. This article proposes a novel Cognitive Pilot-Aircraft Interface (CPAI) concept, which introduces adaptive knowledge-based system functionalities to assist single pilots in the accomplishment of mission-essential and safety-critical tasks in modern commercial transport aircraft. The proposed CPAI system implementation is based on real-time detection of the pilot’s physiological and cognitive states, allowing the avoidance of pilot errors and supporting enhanced synergies between the human and the avionics systems. These synergies yield significant improvements in the overall performance and safety levels. A CPAI working process consisting of sensing, estimation and reconfiguration steps is developed to support the assessment of physiological and external conditions, a dynamic allocation of tasks and adaptive alerting. Suitable mathematical models are introduced to estimate the mental demand associated to each piloting task and to assess the pilot cognitive states. Suitably implemented decision logics allow a continuous and optimal adjustment of the automation levels as a function of the estimated cognitive states. Representative numerical simulation test cases provide a preliminary validation of the CPAI concept. In particular, the continuous adaptation of the flight deck's automation successfully maintains the pilot's task load within an optimal range, mitigating the onset of hazardous fatigue levels. It is anticipated that by including suitably designed Psychophysiological-Based Integrity Augmentation (PBIA) functionalities the CPAI system will allow to fulfil the evolving aircraft certification requirements and hence support the implementation of SPO in commercial transport aircraft.

Technology Focus: Health, Safety, Environment, and Social Responsibility (August 2016)

Overview In April of this year, SPE held its 25th-anniversary Health, Safety, Security, Environment, and Social Responsibility (HSSE-SR) conference in Norway. It is incredible to think about the progress this industry has made since the very first event was held in 1991. The theme this year was fitting: Sustaining Our Future Through Innovation and Collaboration. The technological solutions that have been introduced have helped us be not only more efficient but also safer and more environmentally friendly. The challenges we face now, and into the future, include more oversight from all of our stakeholders—from the governments to the public—all of whom grant us the license to operate. We currently face the acute challenge of sustaining our performance in a low-price environment. The industry is responding by introducing proven lean techniques, to be more capital efficient. At the same time, the demands on the HSSE-SR functional professionals have never been greater, with regulations being created or updated at a rapid pace. The public has an increased focus on our performance. This means the HSSE-SR representatives in our industry must become increasingly savvy, both technically and operationally. Functional leaders must have a firm grounding in the HSSE-SR risks inherent to the operations as well as a good understanding of the business and financials. This knowledge will enable companies to prioritize and direct their focus and resources to the right places. This issue will highlight some of the excellent work being performed in our industry. The journey to an injury- and incident-free operation has many paths, and we can see by the different approaches that progress is being made. Process safety is becoming a routine part of our structure programs and management systems. The ongoing discussions around unconventional development are driving understanding of everything from the potential for injection-induced seismicity to the role of government in regulating drilling and completions. Companies are better at integrating social issues into their overall risk picture and are working more proactively with communities to ensure their license to operate. We are seeing more focus on the emissions from our operations. Because of climate-change concerns, governments are requiring that more be done, which is driving companies to develop new technologies to help identify and fix point sources. And, finally, there is always the human element. It once was very common to see an incident investigation in which the root cause was listed as someone not following a process. Our interactions with high-reliability organizations are shifting the understanding of human factors. At the aforementioned SPE conference, technical experts on human factors, including researchers and pilots for major airlines, discussed how organizations can take the human element into account as they build their equipment, processes, and procedures. This helps us to better look at failures (and successes) through a brain-based focus and understand how to reduce the chance, and outcome, of errors. JPT Recommended additional reading at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org. SPE 174824 Obtaining Operational Efficiencies by Applying Process-Safety KPIs Developed for Offshore Production Installations by Fred A. Infortunio, Swift Worldwide Resources, et al. SPE 177705 Integrating Community Well- Being in Business Decisions by Vishal Shah, Abu Dhabi Gas Development Company, et al. SPE 175449 Safety Critical Tasks: Identification of Human Error To Control Risks From Major Accident Hazards by George Petrie, Consultant, et al. SPE 179221 A Risk-Based Approach to Driving and Journey Management for Land Transport Contractors by G. Wiraatmaja, Schlumberger, et al. SPE 176319 Early Assessment of Environmental and Social Risks and Impacts of a Shale-Gas Development in Morocco by Ignacio Barcelo, Repsol SPE 179203 How an Oilfield Services Company Managed the Ebola Outbreak in Nigeria by U. Okorocha, Schlumberger, et al. SPE 177777 The Normalization of Deviance in the Oil and Gas Industry: The Role of Rig Leadership in Success and Failure by Stewart Hase, Beyond Break, et al.

Using educational video to enhance protocol adherence for medical procedures

BackgroundBetter education of clinicians is expected to enhance patient safety. An important component of education is adherence to standard protocols, which are mainly available in written form. Believing in the potential power of videos, we hypothesized that the introduction of an educational video, based on an institutional standard protocol, would foster adherence to the protocol. MethodsWe conducted a prospective intervention study of 425 anaesthesia procedures and teams (202 pre-video and 223 post-video) involving 1091 team members (516 pre-video and 575 post-video) in seven individual operating areas (with a total of 30 operating rooms) in a university hospital. Failure of adherence to safety-critical tasks during rapid sequence anaesthesia inductions was assessed during systematic on-site observations pre- and post-introduction of an educational video demonstrating evidence-based and best practice guidelines. ResultsThe odds for failure of adherence to safety-critical tasks between the pre- and post-intervention period were reduced, odds ratio 0.34 (95% confidence interval 0.27–0.42, P<0.001). The risk for failure of adherence was reduced significantly for eight of the 14 safety-critical tasks (all P<0.001). ConclusionsThis study provides empirical evidence for the effectiveness of an educational video to enhance adherence to a standard protocol during complex medical procedures. The introduction of a video can reduce failure of adherence to safety-critical tasks and contribute to patient safety. We recommend the introduction of videos to improve protocol adherence.

A Survey of Motion Planning and Control Techniques for Self-Driving Urban Vehicles

Self-driving vehicles are a maturing technology with the potential to reshape mobility by enhancing the safety, accessibility, efficiency, and convenience of automotive transportation. Safety-critical tasks that must be executed by a self-driving vehicle include planning of motions through a dynamic environment shared with other vehicles and pedestrians, and their robust executions via feedback control. The objective of this paper is to survey the current state of the art on planning and control algorithms with particular regard to the urban setting. A selection of proposed techniques is reviewed along with a discussion of their effectiveness. The surveyed approaches differ in the vehicle mobility model used, in assumptions on the structure of the environment, and in computational requirements. The side by side comparison presented in this survey helps to gain insight into the strengths and limitations of the reviewed approaches and assists with system level design choices.

One size fits all? Safety management regulation of ship accidents and personal injuries

Safety management regulation is an important supplement to market forces to establish a sufficient safety level in high-risk industries. The accident statistics in Norwegian maritime passenger transportation display a paradox: personal injuries have decreased while ship accidents have increased in the period during which safety management has been regulated (the International Safety Management Code was effectuated in the late 1990s). We interview regulators, shipping company management, and crewmembers about their practices and opinions regarding safety management regulation and use these data to explore how this regulation influences safety management practices to prevent different types of accidents. This study underlines earlier research showing that regulation serves to ‘raise the bar’ by heightening the industry levels of safety investments and organizational safety awareness. In addition, our results suggest that safety management regulation in maritime transportation is mostly effective for preventing personal injuries in cases in which the personal have sufficient time and resources available, and the procedures are consistent with seafarers’ professional values. For ship accidents, such as groundings, other causal factors come into play. We find that the negative consequences of regulation (proceduralization) in particular influence the performance of safety-critical tasks, such as navigation. This may explain why personal injuries have decreased while ship accident frequencies have continued to increase in spite of the regulations aimed at improving safety.