The Failure Route between Active and Latent Error in Bus Accident

Abstract

It is imperative to examine the differences between active and latent errors in bus accidents. This research aims to study and assess human factors to determine the impact of behavior has in this domain. For this research we examine a set of 452 bus accident investigation reports. Nine evaluators were invited to assess human factors using the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) framework. The inter-evaluator reliability is assessed using the Krippendorff's coefficient. Interdependencies between adjacent horizontal factors and the statistics for human factors were analyzed using odds ratios and lambda and chi-square methods. There are twenty-one significant associations between human factors and the adjacent levels of HFACS. Among them, organizational process and inadequate supervision, inadequate supervision and personal readiness, and personal readiness and violations appear to be the most significant. The four most significant HFACS factors are organizational process, personal readiness, inadequate supervision, and violations. These together form a route of failure. The active error of violations is closely related to the latent errors organizational process, inadequate supervision and personal readiness. Efforts to reduce the incidence of these three errors will significantly decrease the rate of bus-related accidents.

Keywords

• Road accident
• human factors
• failure analysis