Safety and the design process

The impact of traffic information: Dynamics in route and departure time choice

Occupational hazards, risk and solutions

How to design an intelligent anesthesia monitor; Safety and cognition based design in anesthesia monitoring

The maritime pilot at work: Evaluation and use of a time-to-boundary model of mental workload in human-machine systems

People have proven to be flexible and reliable in many control tasks, such as car driving and ship navigation. Much effort has been invested into automating these tasks but the benefits have so far been limited and the problems enormous. Other tasks, such as plant control, where complicated systems are tightly coupled to obtain large volumes of...

Organised Learning from Small-scale Incidents

This thesis describes the search for and findings about methods and mechanisms that help organisations to learn cost-effectively from (small-scale) accidents and other undesired operational surprises. As it shows, organisational learning from such incidents is feasible, but must be organised. The Organisational Learning principles were used to...

Reliability of Landfill Technology

Designing for safety: The free flight air traffic management concept

Theory and pratice of in-hospital patient risk management

Road safety by design: A decision support tool for identifying ex ante evaluation issues of road safety measures

Risk perception in product use

Expecting the unexpected: A study of interactive driving behaviour at intersections

Given the high number of encounters in traffic and the low number of accidents in which these result, it can be concluded that road users are quite good at interacting safely. To achieve a better understanding of this interactive behaviour, this thesis focused on road users' expectancies. In an explorative study, the aspects road users mention...

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

Understanding and Exploring Safety Culture

The match between safety and culture was made around 1986, when the INSAG delivered its initial report on the Chernobyl accident. Whether the marriage is a happy one is still a matter of debate, but it is most definitely a fruitful one. In the past twenty years, many researchers have devoted much effort to both the theoretical development of the...

Assessing Vessel Traffic Service Operator Situation Awareness

This thesis describes my study of situation awareness assessment of Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) operators. VTS operators are the traffic controllers on the water. They are responsible for a safe and efficient handling of vessel traffic. They monitor traffic, provide information on request and coordinate movement of ships in (emerging) conflict...

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...

Identifying and responding to weak signals to improve learning from experiences in high-risk industry

1. Context This thesis forms part of an extended study funded by FonCSI (Fondation pour une Culture de Sécurité Industrielle) about learning systems of major hazard companies. All French industrial sites running a risky activity – e.g. petrochemicals, steel making plants – must put a Safety Management System in place, according to the Seveso II...

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...