Enhancing Safety Through Integrated Incident Investigation Methods

Method

Detail

• Advantage: Models the evolution towards an incident as interactions between human and technical systems and integrates human and technical systems in the analysis.

• Disadvantage: May be complex to implement and requires specialist or expert knowledge.

•  Advantage: Considers multiple levels of decision-making in risk management and provides a comprehensive view of the socio-technical system involved in the accident.
• Disadvantage: May be complex to implement and requires specialist or expert knowledge.

• Advantage: Identifies hazards and barriers that should have prevented the accident and evaluates the performance of barriers.
• Disadvantage: Focuses mainly on physical and management barriers, potentially overlooking other factors.

• Advantage: Examines changes that caused undesired outcomes and helps identify deviations from expected operations.

• Disadvantage: Limited to analyzing differences between accident-free and accident scenarios.

 Events and Causal Factors Charting (ECFC) 

• Advantage: Provides a graphical display of the accident's chronology, helps in organizing evidence and portraying the sequence of events and facilitates communication among investigators.
• Disadvantages: May not effectively illustrate complex relationships between events.

• Advantage: Analyzes event sequences following an initiating event and illustrates the influence of barriers on event sequences.
• Disadvantage: Primarily a proactive risk analysis method, not always suitable for post-accident analysis. 

• Advantage: Breaks down an accident into root causes using logic gates. It can be both qualitative and quantitative.
• Disadvantage: Requires expertise to use effectively and may not capture all possible causes.

• Advantage: Analyzes the hierarchy of root causes, including management decisions and human errors and provides a visual representation of dependencies among events.
• Disadvantage: Can be complex and require specialist knowledge.

• Advantage: Focuses equally on human, organizational, and technical factors and uses structured analysis, change analysis, and barrier analysis.
• Disadvantage: Requires specialist or expert knowledge.

• Advantage: Provides a systematic method for comprehensive accident investigation and focuses on control factors and management system deficiencies.
• Disadvantage: Requires expert knowledge to use effectively.

• Advantage: Identifies underlying deficiencies in safety management systems and provides a systematic process to determine root causes.
• Disadvantage: Requires significant judgment and a comprehensive list of causal factors.

• Advantage: Proposes a systematic process based on multi-linear sequences of events and provides a comprehensive, multi-linear description of the accident process.
• Disadvantage: May be complex to implement without proper training.

• Advantage: Supports occupational incident investigation and uses a checklist to ensure all facets of an accident are examined.
• Disadvantage: May require specialist knowledge for effective use.

• Advantage: Focuses on organizational failures as main factors in accident causation and provides a tree-like overview of the accident.
• Disadvantage: May be complex to implement and requires specialist or expert knowledge.