Human Factor

All over the world, many incident and accident cases involve human error as one of the main causes. The Human factor must always be taken into account in dangerous activities and processes which involves risk with high severe consequences. The human reliability methods are addressed to assess the human performance factors as well as predict the human error probabilities. The methods such as THERP, OAT, ASEP, STAHR, SPAR-H, HEART, BBN support risk assessment as well as maintenance and operational activities in order to avoid human error. Despite the importance of human reliability analysis to mitigate the risk of human error, nowadays such methods are not too much applied in many asset projects or operational phases. This chapter aims to describe the human reliability concepts and methods with examples addressed to incident and accident cases as well as maintenance activities.

Keywords: Performance factor, human error, human reliability, THERP, OAT, ASEP, STAHR, SPAR-H, HEART, BBN.