Author(s)

M. Costescu, E. Doval & S. Kovacs

Abstract

Accidents are often repeated. Not learning from past accidents leads towards new ones. The larger part of occupational accidents are caused by the mistakes of human operators, by their mis-judgements and negligence. Behavioural fault models could describe, on the basis of accident and incident experience, the occurence of an accident by the mistakes made by the operator, putting into balance the initial causes of the mistaken actions (lack of knowledge, trying to shortcut longer but safer procedures, etc.) and the events that occured because of these causes. Behavioural fault models are perfectly able to be developed using ontologies, an assessment system based on past knowledge, and driven by ontologies could be very usefull to judge the safety at a workplace. The paper describes our research in developing such an ontological driven safety assessment system prototype and also the obtained results of running this prototype in Romanian small and medium enterprises. The system starts with the building of a behavioural normal activity model-specific, for example, for the activity of work at heights. By pattern matching this model with behavioural fault models developed from past experiences and also by direct observation of the workplace a quantified degree of safety could be established. Keywords: behavioural fault models, risk assessment, human operator. 1 Introduction Material loss, incidents and accidents at the workplace have almost always the same cause, the same mode of manifestation and the same pre-event warning www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3517 (on-line) WIT Transactions on Information and Communication Technologies, Vol 43, ©2010 WIT Press doi: Risk Analysis VII PI-161

Keywords

behavioural fault models, risk assessment, human operator