A study of extracting and sharing non-technical skills among train drivers in JR east

Since the establishment of JR East, safety has been our top management priority, and the safety of railway transport has improved by implementing various measures. As a result, the safety of railway transport has increased and... [ view full abstract ]

Since the establishment of JR East, safety has been our top management priority, and the safety of railway transport has improved by implementing various measures. As a result, the safety of railway transport has increased and the number of accidents has decreased by about half since the company’s inception. However, “internally caused accidents”have not yet been eradicated. Among these accidents,“signals passed at danger”(SPAD) and“exceeding the speed limit” are factors directly related to the train drivers themselves. Through railway system improvements, such as the introduction of automatic train stop (ATS), the number of incidents of SPAD has decreased considerably. The number of incidents involving exceeded speed limit are subject to the driver’s attentiveness and do not appear to have gone down, due to the human error element. This is because the main objective of past countermeasures for reducing incidents involving exceeded speed limit was to improve technical skills obtained through adherence to rules such as “being careful to confirm signals”. However, the improvement of technical skills by adhering to rules has its limitations. Therefore, we are paying attention to the non-technical skills that train drivers presently have. We believe that detecting a risky situation in which a driver is likely to make a mistakes and devising measures to prevent an error will lead to a more reliable way to mitigate human error.

In this paper, in order to improve drivers’ non-technical skills and prevent accidents, our purpose was to extract skills that a driver uses to detect danger and prevent errors, and share them with drivers in various workplaces at JR East. The reason why this effort is important is because drivers’ skills are limited to tacit knowledge that is not actively or consciously utilized. Therefore, by extracting and sharing skills, we can anticipate that drivers will better understand and consciously utilize those skills. We furthermore strive to upgrade safety by empowering drivers to think and act for themselves a field, with rules and manuals as a foundation. We believe that action from the bottom up is as important as action from the top down. That is to say, in addition to guidance provided by a manager, we believe that it is important to improve the personal ability of drivers who are most aware of the situation in their driving section.

For this presentation, we have conducted on-site interviews regarding driver instruction, extracted and organized various non-technical skills, discuss our findings and issues for the future.