ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the reasons and criteria for causal taxonomies, and describes the development of a generic incident analysis approach for the railway industry: PRISMA-Rail. It suggests that one of the main barriers of effectively and efficiently tackling these problems is the lack of a safety-science based approach for generic incident analysis in this domain. Root cause analysis taxonomies should allow for an overview of relative frequencies of the full range of causes in a database of large numbers of incidents, and for identification of their dominant failure patterns. Medicine proposes an important additional concept to that of failure/error causes: recovery factors/causes, which explain why, in the case of near misses/inconsequential incidents, a series of errors/failures in the end did not result in injuries or worse, but were detected, understood, and corrected in time. Important point in analysis is to clearly distinguish between causal factors and contextual variables.
