Mattias Holmgren

Research

My research aims to understand how risks in technical systems can be reduced by taking into account human error. I have studied railway accidents in Sweden with a focus on collisions and derailments related to improper maintenance. The study shows that inadequate infrastructure maintenance is a significant cause of collisions and derailments. Three significant sources of risk are identified: communication deficiencies, deficiencies in receiving information and omitted work steps.

I have also studied risks in connection with maintenance stoppages at Swedish paper mills, then with a focus on the performers, ie the maintenance staff and their collaboration. Here, too, it was found that inadequate information and communication cause risks in connection with maintenance. One conclusion is that incidents that are made visible in connection with the performance of maintenance may have been caused by sources of risk in other maintenance-related activities in the maintenance process. Therefore, it is important to not only focus the analysis on the actual execution of maintenance, as problems are built in latently through errors in, for example, planning and control of the maintenance process.

In order to achieve continuous improvements and risk reduction, it is helpful to consider maintenance through a process approach. When planning and managing the maintenance process, it should be vertically integrated with the organization's overall goals in order to be efficient, that is, to do the right things. In addition, the maintenance process should also be horizontally integrated with the ongoing operational and modification processes to be efficient, that is, to do things correctly.

Teaching

My interest in education was aroused when I trained parachutists. That training was about getting the students to survive their first parachute shop by being able to escape from the plane and then steer home and land the parachute safely. The idea with the training is that they should be able to perform certain steps under high stress without having to think, ie performed instinctively. To achieve this, they had to practice the same thing over and over again. Special part that deals with the travel tug procedure, ie how a faulty parachute should be disconnected and then pull out the spare parachute. This may seem far from academic education where we expect reflective students, but what I learned is that education must be situational. What would save lives in a stressful situation with small time margins worked for that purpose. Later in the education, the students' stress had decreased, the degree of difficulty increased and the pedagogy changed in step with it. When it came to teaching students a correct fall position, a higher degree of reflection was required. Here we went through the steps and the students got to practice on the lawn before they tested in the air. We alternated theory, exercise and flexible flight and gave feedback on the implementation. Where, as in other education, feedback is important. In order for the feedback to be as effective as possible, it was important that it came directly in connection with the completed steps.

Courses

• Introduction to operation and maintenance - basic concept (D0011B)
• Operation and maintenance (D0002B)
• Life cycle and life cycle cost analysis (D0012B)
• Maintenance Strategy (D0010B)
• Project course in operation and maintenance technology (D0017B)
• Degree Project University Engineer (X0009B)
• Degree Project Master Maintenance Technology (X7014B)

Supervision of Doctoral students

• Prasanna Illankoon
• Mojgan Aalipour
• Robert Lagnebäck