An Analysis of Human Error Mode and Type in the Railway Accidents and Incidents

Human error is one of the major contributors to the railway accidents or incidents. In order to develop an effective countermeasure to remove or reduce human errors, a systematic analysis should be preferentially performed to identify their causes, characteristics, and types of human error induced in accidents or incidents. This paper introduces a case study for human error analysis of the railway accidents and incidents. For the case study, more than 1,000 domestic railway accidents or incidents that happened during the year of 2004 have been investigated and a detailed error analysis was performed on the selected 90 cases, which were obviously caused by human error. This paper presents a classification structure for human error analysis, and summarizes the analysis results such as causes of the events, error modes and types, related worker, and task type.