Design for safety and human factors in industrial engineering. a review towards a unified framework

The rate of accidents in the industrial context is not decreasing significantly, despite the continuous effort of providing stricter safety requisites at the regulatory level. In particular, accidents’ statistics show that most of accidents are related to the interaction between humans and technical systems due to a scarce consideration of human factors’ issues. Based on this, the purpose of the present study is to investigate the recent research addressing design for safety (DfS) in the industrial context, focusing on those research approaches aimed at integrating human factors (HFE) within DfS activities. A systematic review was performed considering engineering journal articles that appeared in literature in the period 1995-2020. From this analysis, it emerged that most studies offered solutions intervening quite late in the design process, while much of the analyzed HFE tools should be applied during the early stages of the design process to augment their effectiveness. Additionally, a research gap between theory and practice was brought to light. Accordingly, the analysis led to the proposal of a unified design for safety process, where the main issues emerged from the literature are converged towards a holistic framework, which can support engineers in integrating human factors in DfS activities in a more practical manner.