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Quantitative Perspectives for Human Performance and Risk

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Human-Automation Interaction

Part of the book series: Automation, Collaboration, & E-Services ((ACES,volume 10))

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Abstract

Human performance is essential to the safe operation of systems for a wide range of industries including nuclear, chemical, oil and gas, aviation, and aerospace. To understand risk and manage safety, the scenarios that lead to hazards for people, equipment, and the environment are evaluated in risk assessments. In probabilistic risk assessments (PRAs), probabilities are estimated for scenarios and their elements to support the prioritization of risk contributors and the selection of system modifications to enhance safety. Within a PRA, the Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) addresses the potential failure events related to human interactions with the technical system. The scope of the human-system interactions addressed in HRA includes human actions to operate, maintain, and to respond to abnormal conditions and emergencies. This chapter presents the scientific basis for HRA and shows the relationship of HRA to the broader field of human factors and ergonomics. Additionally, this chapter provides an overview of HRA methods, the associated empirical data, and the structured analysis process used to identify the key human failure events (HFEs) relevant for safety, to characterize the conditions and factors that affect their occurrence, and to estimate their probabilities. The insights gained from the HRA process and its integration into PRA can be used to improve human performance as well as to identify modifications to hardware, equipment, and automation, with the overall aim of improving safety. Besides comprehensive HRA applications within PRA to evaluate the risk of facilities as a whole, HRA is also used in the design process to evaluate new or modified systems, functions, automation, and human-system interfaces. As a discipline, HRA applies risk and reliability techniques in order to evaluate the impact of human performance on the overall system. This includes human actions whose reliability has been improved by human factors, ergonomics, and human factors engineering; as well as actions within automated systems. The intent of this chapter is to provide the general reader a high-level understanding of how the human element is treated in risk assessments, to provide human factors experts an outline of how their science is transformed into probabilities and integrated in PRA, and to provide PRA practitioners a synopsis of science, empirical data, and judgment blended in the HRA process and outputs. The chapter closes with a summary of recent developments to further advance HRA and overall conclusions on the state of practice.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Some methods use the term PSF and other methods use other terms such as performance influencing factors (PIFs), error producing conditions (EPCs) or other such names. The terms are used interchangeably in this document.

  2. 2.

    For the purpose of making a distinction, human factors processes (i.e., theory, principles, data and methods) that do not incorporate HRA can be referred to as “classical human factors” and human factors processes that do incorporate HRA can be referred to as “risk-informed human factors.”

  3. 3.

    Other complex technologies are intended to include aircraft, spacecraft, railways, military systems, etc. The term “facilities” is used throughout this chapter to refer to all of these.

  4. 4.

    In the rest of this section, this is referred to as the “human factors configuration” or just “configuration.”

  5. 5.

    A hard switch refers to a mechanical device that an operator manipulates by causing a physical change of position while in contact with the device. A soft switch refers to a graphical object on a touch screen that performs a similar function without a physical change of position.

  6. 6.

    While it is clear from the discussion that HRA practitioners are a type of human factors engineer, in this chapter we will use the terminology “human factors engineer” to mean practitioners of classical human factors and identify HRA practitioners specifically when that is what is meant.

  7. 7.

    By “semi-quantitative” application, we mean that frequencies or probabilities are calculated or estimated for the failures identified in these deductive processes such that risk ranking can be determined for the human failures of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jensen Hughes, Rockville, MD, 20850, USA

    Huafei Liao, Paul Amico, Katherine Gunter, Jeffrey Julius & Donald MacLeod

  2. Paul Scherrer Institute, 5232, Villigen, Switzerland

    Vinh Dang & Luca Podofillini

  3. Alpiq AG, Bahnhofquai 12, 4601, Olten, Switzerland

    Davide Mercurio

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  1. Huafei Liao
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Correspondence to Huafei Liao .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Industrial Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Vincent G. Duffy

  2. School of Industrial Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Mark Lehto

  3. School of Industrial Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Yuehwern Yih

  4. Department of Psychological Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Robert W. Proctor

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Liao, H. et al. (2023). Quantitative Perspectives for Human Performance and Risk. In: Duffy, V.G., Lehto, M., Yih, Y., Proctor, R.W. (eds) Human-Automation Interaction. Automation, Collaboration, & E-Services, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10780-1_13

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