Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) (PowerPoint PPTX)

Various industries including aviation sector have realized the need of understating in human factors and utilization and application of the understanding in order to protect human and properties and enhance productivities through maximizing efficiency in workplace.

The Reason model, also known as the organizational incident model, was developed by James Reason and represents the aviation industry as a complex system.

Decision-makers are one of the components of the system: they set the goals of the organization and manage its resources to achieve the best trade-off between safety and timely, cost-effective performance. Line management is another component of the system, making the workforce execute the measures taken by the decision-makers. For the front-line operators to act in an effective way some preconditions must be met, and defenses must be put in place to prevent incidents and accidents. As technology advances and systems become more complex accidents are rarely caused by the front-line operators only and can be traced back to the interactions of flaws and failures lying within the system.

Reason recognizes four sequential failure domains in the system:
1. Organizational influences;
2. Unsafe supervision;
3. Preconditions for unsafe acts;
4. Unsafe acts.

From this decomposition Reason's model has a strong focus on the organizational aspect of the aviation industry and the causes of an accident or incident can be positively identified inside the four domains.

Such failures, portrayed as holes in the safety barriers, can be classified by means of the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS). This system was developed by Wiegmann and Shappel to deal with increasing problems relating with human performance in the US Navy. HFACS retains the level distinction made by Reason and further breaks down each level into causal categories that allow the identification of the latent and active failures.

HFACS provides a taxonomy made up of about 150 entries of human factors in aviation.

The 48-slides PowerPoint document gives you an effective overview of the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS), the most popular framework for investigating human errors in flight operations, In order to make full use of the systems approach and look beyond the active failures and so identify latent failures.