A proposal of a fuzzy cognitive map modeling human cognitive process with emphasis of situation awareness errors

Railway security and safety have become a key element of railway services.  Nowdays researchers focus efforts on approaches centered on human factors to understand accidents that route back to human factors. Several research... [ view full abstract ]

Railway security and safety have become a key element of railway services.  Nowdays researchers focus efforts on approaches centered on human factors to understand accidents that route back to human factors. Several research reveal that human errors are contributing factors to many incidents and accidents in several domains including railways. A significant number of near misses have occurred due to the complacency effect associated with situation awareness errors.

In this paper, a new approach towards railway incident and accident analysis will be presented. The method simply combines the situation awareness model with the fuzzy cognitive mapping techniques for modeling human cognitive process responsible of the occurrence of human errors.

We begin this paper with a brief overview of situation awareness and fuzzy cognitive maps, and discuss the critical contribution of situation awareness errors in railway incidents and accidents. Then, we provide a description of the modeling approach of our fuzzy cognitive map presenting the human cognitive processes. This cognitive map may provide valuable insight on how the situation awareness errors and human errors occur within a hidden hazardous situation.

Our work focuses on improving the representation of situation awareness as illustrated in our proposed model highlighting human cognitive process in a hidden hazardous situation in railway environment, through the use of fuzzy cognitive mapping techniques. The validation methodology is described and we conclude with our model limitations and future directions that could arise from this effort.