The identification of incidental learning as a cause of human error by exploring big data within railway safety

Accidents at work come at a major cost including fatalities, disability and economic burden. The ideas around accident causation have changed over time from describing accidents as ‘acts of gods’ and as the fault of individual employees, to accidents being the result of an interaction between organizational, technical and human factors. Included...

Air Traffic Control Advisory System for the Prevention of Bird Strikes

Bird strike prevention in civil aviation has traditionally focused on the airport perimeter. Since the risk of especially damaging bird strikes outside the airport boundaries is rising, this PhD thesis researches the safety potential of operational bird strike prevention involving pilots and controllers. In such a concept, controllers would be...

Dam Safety Concepts

The majority of dams constructed in the world are dams that can be categorized as embankment dams. Throughout history we can point to many failures of dams, and embankment dams in particular. Nowadays it is clear that the goal to construct stable dams has not been achieved, even with advanced technologies and construction techniques available....

Towards safer laparoscopic surgery: Training and assessment of surgical skills and equipment handling

The objective of this thesis is to improve laparoscopic surgical skills training and assessment with an emphasis on equipment-related safety and competence. A comparison was made between a hospital and a petrochemical company and showed that employees at the petrochemical company were trained and certified in equipment handling much more...

Dynamics and Fuel Cycle Analysis of a Graphite-Moderated Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor

Safety Management and Risk Modelling in Aviation: The challenge of quantifying management influences

Aviation accidents result from a combination of many different causal factors ( human errors, technical failures, environmental and organisational influences). Increasing interest over the past two decades in causal modelling of organisational factors has been motivated by the desire to understand these fundamental causes and their influences in...

Fragile yet Ductile: Structural Aspects of Reinforced Glass Beams

This dissertation investigates the structural aspects of reinforced glass beams. The concept of these beams, which are intended for building applications, is to provide redundancy even if the glass is broken. This redundancy is obtained through a small reinforcement section that is bonded at the tensile edge of the glass beam. Upon glass failure...

Adaptive Backstepping Control and Safety Analysis for Modern Fighter Aircraft

There exist many examples of aircraft incidents in which the pilots have successfully used the remaining control authority over an aircraft to save the airframe and its passengers and cargo from apparently hopeless failure conditions. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. Several accidents happened in which the crew was not able to save the...

Pilot Task Demand Load During RNAV Approaches

The question that started this research was: “Why is approach A more difficult to fly for a pilot than approach B?”. To find an answer to this question, pilots flew a large variety of Area Navigation (RNAV) approaches during several flight simulator and real flight experiments. The results of these experiments were analyzed and resulted in seven...

Modelling Risk Control Measures in Railways: Analysing how designers and operators organise safe rail traffic

Safe, high-quality and more frequent rail services are desired by both society and passengers. Since large scale infrastructure extensions to accommodate higher train frequencies are hardly practicable, a more intense network utilisation is considered the way to achieve these aims. As a result, trains will get in each other’s way more frequently...

Safety Concepts in Structural Glass Engineering: Towards an Integrated Approach

This dissertation proposes the Integrated Approach to Structural Glass Safety, based on four clearly defined element safety properties, damage sensitivity, relative resistance, redundancy, and fracture mode. The Element Safety Diagram (ESD) is introduced to provide an easy-to-read graphical representation of these properties. The safety...

Causal risk models of air transport: Comparison of user needs and model capabilities

Rail estate, multiple use of space and railway infrastructure

The demand for new development sites, coupled with a wish to preserve green areas outside cities, is provoking increasing interest in inner-city redevelopment. All over Europe, projects of multiple use of space are appearing that involve developing high-quality buildings in which to live and work, while taking account of the history of the city...

Ethical issues in engineering design safety and sustainability

The goal of this research is to obtain insight in how engineers deal with ethical issues in daily engineering design practice. It is reasonable to assume that ethical issues and the way engineers deal with them depend on characteristics of the design process. I have made use of Vincentis dimensions to characterize different design processes:...

RingRing; ondergronds bouwen voor meervoudig ruimtegebruik boven en langs de Ring in Rotterdam en in Amsterdam

Vijf jaar promotieonderzoek naar de mogelijke inzet van ondergronds bouwen voor de inpassing van autosnelwegen leidde tot deze publicatie. Verkeerstunnels moeten de ruimtelijke kwaliteit rond de infrastructuur verbeteren en mogelijkheden bieden voor meervoudig ruimtegebruik. De Ring Rotterdam en de Ring Amsterdam staan model voor deze benadering...

Stability of Continuous Welded Rail Track