ABSTRACT
Developments in pharmaceuticals and medical care as well as in food production, communications, and transport are some of the most obvious areas in which technology has made vast impacts on the majority of people’s lives. The application of modern technology on an industrial scale carries with it the risk of catastrophic malfunction, leading to an emergency of some kind. Control is taken to include the conceptualization, design, and initial application of technology as well as the operation of it in practice. Society’s response to the problem has been to evolve institutional frameworks and social mechanisms that seek to prevent or mitigate the effect of failures of the human/machine interface as well as the effect of failures in the operation of the machinery itself. In the railroad industry, failure of the correct interaction between human actors on the one hand and control technology on the other has the potential for very serious accidents and emergencies to arise.
