ABSTRACT
Inspection tasks have been a minor but continuing theme in human factors / ergonomics (HFE) practice and literature since the 1950’s. Many ergonomists have been asked to improve jobs and workplaces where items were inspected and have contributed to an evolving understanding of how people make repetitive decisions, often Yes/No decisions about goods and services. Most of our understanding of inspection tasks is based on these practical studies, often augmented by off-line studies to better model the effects of variables noted but uncontrolled in the field. Of course ergonomists were not the only ones studying inspection: there are long traditions in quality control and equipment/automation design that have very little (and that often derogatory) to say about the human in the inspection system. More modern strictures on quality have emphasized open-loop control of industrial processes rather than inspection as a way of ensuring that defective items are all but eliminated from the process. This has led to calls to end inspection a position
significantly aided by automation of many measurement tools. A different class of inspection tasks is embodied in the continuing inspection of built systems to ensure that defects have not arisen and thus the system is still safe for public use. Here we include the inspection of railway tracks for a range of conditions that could compromise passenger safety, and parallel inspections of civil aircraft structures, or of passenger bags being brought into the civil aviation system. Without too much of a stretch, this class can include medical inspection, e.g. radiography or endoscopy, designed to ensure that the human body is still working as expected. In parallel to the quality control literature, there is an equally well-developed
literature on auditing, although again this rarely makes explicit mention of the human auditor. There have been audit programs developed for ergonomics / human factors but little consideration of auditing as inspection of systems rather than of objects. Finallywe consider the potential application of findings on human and automated
inspection to audit tasks by comparing their functional similarity to ask whether we can improve auditing processes by treating them as inspection of systems. The genesis of this extension came from a request by G. Salvendy for the author to combine his previous Handbook chapters on Human Factors and Automation in Test and Inspection (Drury, 2001a) and Human Factors Audit (Drury, 2001b) into a single chapterHuman Factors and ErgonomicsAudits (Drury, 2006). The obvious response to this request was to devise a framework that would cover both traditions and lead to new applications. This paper is the result.
