Understanding safety and production risks in rail engineering planning and protection

Much of the published human factors work on risk is to do with safety and within this is concerned with prediction and analysis of human error and with human reliability assessment. Less has been published on human factors contributions to understanding and managing project, business, engineering and other forms of risk and still less jointly assessing risk to do with broad issues of ‘safety’ and broad issues of ‘production’ or ‘performance’. This paper contains a general commentary on human factors and assessment of risk of various kinds, in the context of the aims of ergonomics and concerns about being too risk averse. The paper then describes a specific project, in rail engineering, where the notion of a human factors case has been employed to analyse engineering functions and related human factors issues. A human factors issues register for potential system disturbances has been developed, prior to a human factors risk assessment, which jointly covers safety and production (engineering delivery) concerns. The paper concludes with a commentary on the potential relevance of a resilience engineering perspective to understanding rail engineering systems risk. Design, planning and management of complex systems will increasingly have to address the issue of making trade-offs between safety and production, and ergonomics should be central to this. The paper addresses the relevant issues and does so in an under-published domain – rail systems engineering work.

Identification of resilience factors in rail engineering work

This paper discusses an ongoing project that aims at improving the potential for resilience of a system responsible for the planning of rail engineering work delivery. It focuses on the use of a human factors based approach as a way to achieve this end. In particular, the paper discusses the initial data collected by means of interviews and how this process gave way to a two fold goal: Understanding how the planning process works in reality and identifying any critical aspects of the system from a Resilience Engineering perspective. Given the nature of the process under study, information flows and communication issues have been given particular attention throughout the data collection and analysis stages. Initial data confirms that the planning process is greatly reliant on the capability of people using their knowledge and skills to communicate in a dynamic informational environment. Finally, the added value of the interviews is discussed from a human factors perspective and as a mean towards the aim of better understanding resilience in rail engineering planning.

Museus locais e ecomuseologia : estudos do projecto para o Ecomuseu da Murtosa

O presente estudo tem por objectivo contribuir para a compreensão do entendimento do conceito de Ecomuseologia baseado na análise do projecto do Ecomuseu da Murtosa. Esse projecto foi elaborado pelo Centro de Estudo de Sociomuseologia da Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias. Essa dissertação trabalha com os seguintes aspectos: . A contextualização da acção museológica do ponto de vista do património, com referência ao planeamento local e regional; . O estudo da realidade dos museus locais portugueses baseada na teoria museológica contemporânea e nas políticas da Comunidade Europeia para o desenvolvimento do património; . A análise do Projecto do Ecomuseu da Murtosa em relação as políticas da comunidade europeia, aos conceitos de serviços do ecomuseu, e ao papel do ecomuseu com relação as actividades educacionais e patrimoniais. O estudo também apresenta os princípios nos quais o planeamento dos ecomuseus podem ser desenvolvidos no contexto da administração local. (Dissertação de Mestrado em Museologia, em 2000)