Human error risk management methodology for safety audit of a large railway organisation

This paper considers the application of the human error risk management for engineering systems (HERMES) methodology for safety assessment studies. The application concerns the recurrent safety audits (RSA) of a large organisation in the domain of railway transportation systems. The objective of the study was the identification of the most relevant areas of intervention for improving safety and reliability of the service. The methodology has been applied to the whole organisation and its working processes. Specific attention was paid to train drivers. A number of critical indicators of safety and recurrent safety audit matrices were identified, which enabled the assessment of the safety level of the organisation and the generation of safety recommendations. The application of HERMES to this case study shows that the methodology is applicable in practice and can give valuable and significant results. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.