A Human Performance Operational Railway Index to Estimate Operators’ Error Probability

Over the years, a large number of railway accidents around the world resulting in many injuries, fatalities and a high economic cost have occurred due to operational human degraded performance. The literature shows that it is the train drivers, signallers and controllers (are referred to as operators) that mostly affect the network in terms of safety. Operators’ capabilities and attitudes, the provided training, organizational, task or environmental conditions amongst others, influence to some extent human performance within the railway system. Assessing human performance in the railway system can help to identify the safety limitations before they lead to major accidents. Thus, this chapter introduces a new approach referred to as the Human Performance Railway Operational Index (HuPeROI), which aims not only to estimate the human error probability for railway operations but also to propose mitigation strategies to minimize phenomena such as operators’ degraded performance