ABSTRACT
Introduction: Because Taiwan is surrounded by sea, its international trade depends on air and sea transportation. Sea transportation is the most popular way to transport chemical goods. The workers who participate in this process include sailors, operators and ship members. This study aims to detect the potential human factors and calculate human reliability within this process. Method: The Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) was used to decompose the whole work into units and to analyze the processes; Systematic Human Error Reduction and Prediction Approach (SHERPA) was used to detect the possible human factors in this process. The questionnaire also was used to investigate the workers’ experience about program design and the hardware practicability. A group of 40 workers participated. Result: According to HTA, the whole work decomposed into 7 parts: arrivals, loading preparation, pre-loading, loading, pro-loading, leaving preparation, and departures. SHERPA found the most popular error types were action error (49%) and check error (44%). And the questionnaire analysis of the workers’ experience about the program design and hardware practicability showed that the workers’ knowledge and attitude had a negative relationship. Discussion: The results of HTA and SHERPA indicate that the potential human factors play a huge proportion in this process. The suggestions are that program design could be improved and the workers need reeducation.
