Inspection: From goods through passengers to systems

Ergonomics work on inspection started with field studies of people inspecting components repetitively, often in a line production environment. The original papers on the ergonomics of industrial inspection were often written by psychologists with a highly interpretive and contextual view of the process they were reporting on. Since that time (1950's) studies moved to laboratory settings, with emphasis on mathematical modeling, although many quantitative field studies were also performed. Modern production processes deemphasize and even denigrate inspection as unproductive or counterproductive. Ergonomics studies of inspection began to expand into maintenance inspection, e.g. of aircraft or their components, into medical radiology and more recently into the airport security domain. With good qualitative and quantitative models of inspection available, we should now be in a position to tackle more abstract domains, applying what we have learned to inspection of organizations for safety, or complex paperwork systems for compliance. In these areas, what we know about inspection complements what we know about auditing processes and systems for compliance. There is a demand to better understand such inspection/audit activities, for example in government oversight of aviation maintenance or procedure compliance.