Insights is a revolutionary advance in modeling that abstracts knowledge about the patterns of duty and rest that cause fatigue. It builds on the understanding that schedule-induced fatigue is the product of patterns of duties and prior rest, not simply isolated events in time. Consider an employee calling in fatigued for work; it is the result of prior work and prior rest which has led them to place the call, not the isolated work event coming up. The very definition of the noun “insight” is the act of comprehending the true nature of a complex situation (1).
Up until now, fatigue models have been limited to focus on finding those individual schedules that had high levels of fatigue, unable to abstract from those individual cases the fundamental knowledge needed to avoid fatigue in the future. Performance and sleep metrics help us triage schedules and address the immediate problem, but that is as far as it goes. Fatigue hazard identification has been a reactionary process, performing analysis on schedules which have already been built. This approach is akin to treating a symptom, without addressing the underlying malady.
Insights breaks the cycle by identifying the true target for mitigation - patterns of duties and rest that reliably are creating fatigue hazards. It does so by using signal detection theory to differentiate between information-bearing patterns and random patterns that distract from the information. Insights automates the fatigue risk management predictive fatigue hazard identification process by integrating it into the overall fatigue modeling solution. With Insights, fatigue risk management becomes an evolutionary process that gradually learns best practices to minimize schedule-induced fatigue.
Insights can identify multiple kinds of fatigue hazard: low effectiveness, low sleep reservoir, high fatigue hazard area and/or workload. By including workload as a fatigue hazard, Insights is one step closer to predicting the impact workload has on performance. A fatigue hazard class can be a combination of factors that might be overlooked when looking at one factor at a time, such as High Workload and Low Sleep Reservoir.
Insights is applicable to a broad range of scheduling applications. Within aviation, Insights is equally applicable to short-and medium-haul operations that might experience high levels of workload and sleep debt, and to long-haul and international operations that might experience cumulative sleep debt and circadian disruption. Within rail and transit, Insights can evaluate the proposed schedules to quickly identify patterns that frequently cause fatigue and should be mitigated.
SAFTE-FAST Insights: providing the ability to discern the true nature of fatigue hazards.
Footnotes