Human factors considerations for system safety

The author has found that in many cases industry produces Safety Case reports that provide only limited safety assurance and, like the proverbial 'head in the sand' ostrich, the dominant system safety risks associated with the human factors are too often ignored. This paper provides a brief outline of the Human Factors discipline and its important relationship with systems safety. The paper then provides a discussion on some of the more commonly experienced human-factors problems relating to systems procurement, human-computer interaction and organisational issues before making some modest proposals for improvements in these areas. The paper concludes that the application of Human Factors techniques promotes engineering solutions that take account of human capabilities and limitations which can address the major risks to systems safety.