Gemma Read

The systems thinking philosophy has become popular in human factors and ergonomics and safety science. These methods are being used to understand and resolve complex societal problems in areas such as transport safety, workplace safety, medication error, disaster management, child abuse, financial crises, terrorism, climate change and public health and wellbeing. This handbook presents practical step-by-step guidance for practitioners and researchers wishing to use these methods to tackle complex problems. Each method includes an example case study which demonstrates how the method can be applied and how the results can be interpreted and translated into practical recommendations. The book presents practical guidance on state-of-the-art systems thinking methods and offers case study applications describing systems thinking methods in novel areas. It explains how to translate the outputs of systems thinking methods in practice and introduces systems thinking with an overview of Human Factors and Ergonomics applications. This book will serve as a great reference for students and engineers in the field of systems engineering, complex systems and the design and development of systems, including ergonomics/human factors and systems engineers, designers, architects, industrial engineers, project management engineers, reliability engineers, risk engineers, software engineers and computer engineers.

How can we design transport environments that cater to the situation awareness needs of different end-users? This book answers this question by showcasing how state-of-the-art human factors theory and methods can be used to understand how situation awareness differs across drivers, cyclists, motorcyclists, and pedestrians and creates new designs that cater to these diverse situation awareness needs. Written by experts in the field and based on a major program of work funded by the Australian Research Council, this book outlines the distributed situation awareness model and provides practical guidance on how to study situation awareness naturalistically and how to create designs that support, rather than hinder, situation awareness. The book closes by outlining outline a generic framework to support similar applications in other areas, and discusses future applications in areas such as vehicle automation, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity.

Governments and road safety agencies around the world have either introduced or are considering 'safe system' strategies, a long overdue acknowledgement that different elements of the road system contribute to road safety outcomes. Human factors approaches have a leading role here in both conceptualising the road system as a complex sociotechnical system and in providing practical approaches to support true systems-based countermeasures. This book illustrates the potential for integrating contemporary systems-based human factors methods with modern day driving-assessment methods, such as vehicle instrumentation and driving simulation, to understand and enhance performance in modern day road-transport systems. The book outlines why a fundamental paradigm shift is needed in the way these systems are designed and operated, and illustrates how a wide range of accepted human-factors approaches can be applied successfully to road transport to revolutionise the countermeasure design process. The practical illustrations of these human factors methods are applied to a long-standing road and rail safety issue: rail level crossings, where the road and rail systems intersect. The final chapter of the book highlights the utility of the human factors approach to reducing road trauma and discusses future applications of the approach. [Book Synopsis]