Importance of Human Error to Prevent Industrial Accidents

There have been many efforts to prevent accidents in Korea for the last 25 years. Many measures in the area of hardware sciences including electrical, mechanical, chemical engineering, etc. were applied to eliminate or at least reduce causes of accidents. However, the accidents rate has not been reduced much despite of these measures. This research aimed to find real causes of these accidents and to suggest a comprehensive model that can mainly be applied to industrial fields to find potential or existence of human errors during the pre-installation stage or after an accident. We tried to explain sequences of an operator's information process that might cause human errors on one hand, and life cycle stages of facilities involved when human errors occur on the other hand. With this comprehensive model presented in this research, one can follow up the sequence of human errors caused by operators. Further, errors made at the design stage which could be a main cause of accidents can be tracked. It is recommended that this comprehensive model should be used to prevent human errors in industrial fields since safety personnel can easily find out errors or error potentials through the life cycle stages of manmachine facilities.