| Description: | The maritime world has long kept human factors and
engineering design or engineered systems in silos. The resulting Newtonian way of thinking continues to be valid with engineered
design of ships, berths, ports, and navigable channels, following a reductionist approach to component reliability. However, human beings and
groups (organizations – that use engineered design) are not governed by these well understood engineering principles. Human beings are better understood by using principles
of social sciences / organization theory. Human beings are as much a part of the system as the engineered hardware or equipment. These human beings in the
system are crew, regulators, terminals, service providers, vessel traffic systems, vessel
management staff and classification societies, etc... Therefore, marine
transportation system (MTS) is a sociotechnical system, influencing and being
influenced by the components including humans, of this system.
Therefore, in order to reduce marine accidents and improve
marine safety, it is necessary to consider the MTS as a complex sociotechnical system. It
requires organizational resilience for dynamically adapting to changes. It
requires system approaches to manage risks. This adaptability requires
performance variability for safe outcomes similar to other High Reliability Organizations (HRO). Marine safety as an outcome does not come solely from component reliability but from the system’s total resilience to changes and organizational
capability in three areas:
capability
to recognize the boundaries of safe operation, capability
to steer back from them in a controlled manner, and capability to recover from a loss of control if
it does occur within defined time.
|
