Citation

Ramos MA, Utne IB, Mosleh A. Safety Sci. 2020; 121: 632-633.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ssci.2019.05.018

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Recently, Wróbel and Montewka (2019) published a short paper in the Safety Science Journal about a study we published in the same journal, entitled "Collision avoidance on maritime autonomous surface ships: Operators' tasks and human failure events" (Ramos et al., 2019). Although we believe that the comments in Wróbel and Montewka (2019) are relatively minor, we appreciate them as they raise some interesting points that deserve further clarification related to the background and assumptions in our work. Generally, we believe that research develops dynamically, and that in most of the peer-reviewed papers we, as researchers, are not offering a final solution; rather, we offer a possible solution and a starting point for discussion and further work. It is with the aim to advance science and in this spirit that, in appreciation of Wróbel and Montewka comments, we briefly discuss their main points in the present "comments - on - comments" short paper.

Our study (Ramos et al., 2019) centers on a collision scenario of an unmanned autonomous ship through the perspective of operators working in a control center onshore. The paper analyzes the operators' tasks for avoiding collision through a Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA), making use of a cognitive model for the re-description of the tasks: the IDAC (Chang and Mosleh, 2007) (Information, Decision and Action in a Crew context) model. Following the task analysis and its description, it further identifies how the operators could fail in accomplishing them. The study demonstrates that humans will still play an important role in autonomous ships operation in the near future. The recognition of possible human errors and consequent strategies to avoid them can thus be crucial for a safe operation...

Language: en