ABSTRACT
Human error has been blamed for countless catastrophes, yet errors are often merely symptoms of much larger underlying design problems. Human error is of particular concern for banking, commerce, medicine, military and other systems where tasks are performed with high frequency, or where the consequences of mistakes are grave or costly. Most approaches to error-tolerant design use either general design guidelines or treat humans as just another error-prone system component. J. Reason’s human error taxonomy is framed around Rasmussen’s Skills-Rules-Knowledge framework. Many error-tolerant design efforts rely on general design guidelines. D. J. Mayhew, provides a more theoretical mapping of guidelines into motor, cognitive, and perceptual areas, but has no framework to comprehensively address human error. An effective error-tolerant design must address multiple aspects of human error to build a comprehensive, multi-layered defense. These aspects include error prevention, reduction, detection, identification, and correction, resumption of normal activities, and failure mitigation.
