ABSTRACT

Because of the development of the 24/7 operations in various industries, human fatigue is today considered as one of the major risks for safety. To date, the prescriptive approach through the regulation of duty hours is the traditional way to prevent fatigue. However, besides the inherent rigidity of regulations from an operational point of view, this often fails to take into account all of the complex dimensions of fatigue. In order to cope with this complexity, Fatigue Risk Management Systems (FRMS) are progressively emerging. Rather than setting absolute duty time limitations, a FRMS approach evaluates each operation in terms of fatigue risk. FRMS can be seen as a concrete way to engineer resilience because it requires the organisation to adjust its functioning by re-introducing safety managed by humans in addition to safety by regulations. This chapter presents a concrete application of FRMS in civil aviation. The whole process of the FRMS is described, from the use of predictive models of fatigue to minimize the risk at the aircrew scheduling stage to the development of fatigue related indicators. The principles of the FRMS are discussed from the Resilience Engineering perspective.