Human Factor Analysis of the Railway Traffic Operators

The human factor is an essential aspect of the operability and safety of many technical systems. This paper focuses on the analysis of human errors in the railway domain. The subject of human reliability analysis is the behavior of operators of station-signaling systems responsible for rail traffic management. We use a technique for human-error rate prediction as the 1st generation human reliability analysis to deal with task analyses, error identification and representation, and the quantification of human error probabilities. The paper contributes to the comparison of three technologically different railway traffic control systems, having different degrees of automation—from the manually operated (electro-mechanical), through semi-automated (relay-based) to almost fully automated (computer-based) station-signaling systems. We observe the frequency of individual operations performed in time intervals and calculate human error probability and human success probability values for each operation. Thus, we can analyze human reliability and compare the workload of operators working with control systems of different degrees of automation.