In this paper, we discuss the grounding of the Royal Majesty, reconstructed from the perspective of the crew. The aim is particularly to understand the role of automation in shaping crew assessments and actions. Automation is often introduced because of quantitative promises that: it will reduce human error; reduce workload; and increase efficiency. But as demonstrated by the Royal Majesty, as well as by numerous research results, automation has qualitative consequences for human work and safety, and does not simply replace human work with machine work. Automation changes the task it was meant to support; it creates new error pathways, shifts consequences of error further into the future and delays opportunities for error detection and recovery. By going through the sequence of events that preceded the grounding of the Royal Majesty, we highlight the role that automation plays in the success and failure of navigation today. We then point to future directions on how to make automated systems into better team players.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	Automation; Human factors; Integration; Maritime; automation; navigation aid; ship technology
Research Division:	Engineering
Research Group:	Mechanical Engineering
Research Field:	Automation and Control Engineering
Objective Division:	Transport
Objective Group:	Water Transport
Objective Field:	International Sea Freight Transport (excl. Live Animal Transport)
Author:	Lutzhoft, MH (Professor Margareta Lutzhoft)
ID Code:	91904
Year Published:	2002
Web of Science® Times Cited:	38
Deposited By:	Seafaring
Deposited On:	2014-06-03
Last Modified:	2014-06-20
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