A Questionnaire Study of Accidents in Advanced Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

Manufacturing automation has eliminated many traditional risks of injury, but new types of risks have appeared. In the United States only a limited amount of data is available on automated manufacturing-related accidents, or these data cannot be distinguished from general accident data. The purpose of this study was to collect data on accidents related to advanced manufacturing systems (CIMS). A questionnaire requesting information on one serious computer-integrated accident that occurred in the respondent's plant was used to collect the data. The presented results are based on the analysis of 85 cases. The cases included six fatal injuries, as well as several severe injuries that led to amputation. The results confirm the need to pay more attention to prevention of production disturbances in CIMS, especially in the case of material handling equipment. A relatively large amount of cases involving defeated safety devices calls for the design of intelligent safety systems that protect the human operator, but do not interfere with the work to be done, even during the disturbance situations.

Testing and Improving an ISO 14119-Inspired Tool to Prevent Bypassing Safeguards on Industrial Machines

“…Therefore, the management of such reliable organizations does not overlook the contributing causes of occupational accidents in order to prevent incidents in the working environment. Published information related to the occupational accidents identified bypassing safeguards as one of the contributing causes [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]. Management needs to consider this unsafe act in work areas to prevent bypassing-related accidents, which is a significant factor in maintaining the link between safety and operations management in order to achieve organizational excellence.…”

“…After exploring the incentives to bypass, they presented, based on a literature review, 82 preventive recommendations to reduce or eliminate the incentives for defeating in many different industries. The most frequent improvement proposals suggested by the literature are (i) improving the design of machines and safeguards, (ii) considering employees' points of view for machine procurement, (iii) providing adequate supervision, (iv) training employees to understand the necessity of using safety measures, and (v) periodic inspections performed by managers and supervisors to ensure that interlocks were enabled [8,19,23,31,[46][47][48]50,54,55]. Dźwiarek [57] recently presented measures and technical solutions to limit the circumvention of interlocking devices related to the guards.…”

Testing and Improving an ISO 14119-Inspired Tool to Prevent Bypassing Safeguards on Industrial Machines

“…Therefore, the management of such reliable organizations does not overlook the contributing causes of occupational accidents in order to prevent incidents in the working environment. Published information related to the occupational accidents identified bypassing safeguards as one of the contributing causes [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]. Management needs to consider this unsafe act in work areas to prevent bypassing-related accidents, which is a significant factor in maintaining the link between safety and operations management in order to achieve organizational excellence.…”

“…After exploring the incentives to bypass, they presented, based on a literature review, 82 preventive recommendations to reduce or eliminate the incentives for defeating in many different industries. The most frequent improvement proposals suggested by the literature are (i) improving the design of machines and safeguards, (ii) considering employees' points of view for machine procurement, (iii) providing adequate supervision, (iv) training employees to understand the necessity of using safety measures, and (v) periodic inspections performed by managers and supervisors to ensure that interlocks were enabled [8,19,23,31,[46][47][48]50,54,55]. Dźwiarek [57] recently presented measures and technical solutions to limit the circumvention of interlocking devices related to the guards.…”

HEDOMS?Human Error and Disturbance Occurrence in Manufacturing Systems: Toward the development of an analytical framework

“…A finding common to these studies is that accidents tend to occur more often in abnormal, conflicting system states than in normal ones (Bernhart et al, 1984;Faverge, 1970). Furthermore, the number of accidents occurring while the operator is involved in troubleshooting or disturbance control tasks varies between one-third and two-thirds of the total of accidents analyzed (Backström and Harms-Ringdahl, 1984;Kuivanen, 1990;Laflamme, 1993;Järvinen and Karwowski, 1993;Järvinen and Karwowski, 1995;Backström and Döös, 1995;Mattila, et al, 1995).…”