Mining Publication: Predicting System Interactions in the Design Process

• Health and safety programs
• Mining, tunneling, and excavating machinery
• Tool design
• Visibility hazards
• Work design
• Workstation design

It was evident that operators had adapted to the visibility and positioning difficulties of remote control operation but, in some cases, at the expense of health and safety. If this system change from on-board to remote operation had been investigated from a more global view including technical as well as human factors issues, some of these issues could have been resolved prior to implementation. It would have been easy to predict such problems as the visibility restrictions and that the illumination system on the remote mining machine would need to be changed. Many industries other that mining can use this approach to evaluate current and new design. If human factors are ignored until after major decisions have been made, it is difficult to make ore than minor changes. Simply put, the earlier human factors get involved in a design process, the better, and the safer the outcome will be (Chapanis, 1996).