Controlling fatigue risk in safety-critical workplaces: A summary of selected papers from the 9th International Conference on Managing Fatigue in Transportation, Resources and Health

The Special Issue of Accident Analysis and Prevention is predominantly based on papers that were presented at the 9th International Conference on Managing Fatigue in Transportation, Resources and Health, held in Fremantle, Western Australia in March 2015. Parkes used a self-report questionnaire to examine the impact of doing overtime on the sleep of 551 personnel working 12-h day shifts on oil/gas installations in the North Sea. Even in the absence of working overtime, 12-h shifts pose two other challenges that can lead to elevated levels of fatigue, relatively long work hours and relatively short sleep opportunities. Dorrian and colleagues used a crowdsourcing internet market- place to examine the relationship between alertness and spatial attention with 530 right-handed volunteers. Spatial attention was assessed using a task that presented participants with 72 pre-bisected lines and required them to indicate whether the left or right segment of each one was longer. For people with a morning preference, attention was more focused to the right-hand side for those who performed the task later in the day compared to those who performed the task earlier in the day. Skornyakova and researchers conducted a laboratory-based shift work simulation study with 15 young adults over a 6-day period to examine sleep duration and sustained attention while working two different watch schedules used by the US Navy. Zhou and colleagues conducted a laboratory-based shiftwork simulation with 29 young adults to examine subjective sleepiness during simulated shifts while living on split and consolidated sleep-wake schedules for a week. formal safety management system. Dawson and researchers examined how bio-mathematical models are used within risk management systems to control fatigue. In their review, the authors state that the current modal approach is to apply a threshold value for a particular bio-mathematical model�s output to determine whether or not a working time arrangement is safe