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

Abstract

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 in the more recent ideas is the notion that organizations have a role and responsibility in preventing accidents. Prevention can include eliminating error-promoting factors or adding safety barriers to prevent errors from leading to accidents.
When employees interact with any system in their organization, interventions can be aimed at employees and at the system. When investigating possibilities to improve the system, it is important to take into account how employees interact with the system. We need to be able to predict human behavior and in order to do that, we need to understand human behavior....