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Crosswalk of Human Reliability Methods for Offshore Oil Incidents

PresentationHuman reliability analysis (HRA) has long been employed in nuclear power applications to account for the human contribution to safety. HRA is used qualitatively to identify and model sources of human error and quantitatively to calculate the human error probabilities of particular tasks. The nuclear power emphasis of HRA has helped ensure safe practices and risk-informed decision making in the international nuclear industry. This emphasis has also tended to result in a methodological focus on control room operations that are very specific to nuclear power, thereby potentially limiting the applicability of the methods for other safety critical domains. In recent years, there has been interest to explore HRA in other domains, including aerospace, defense, transportation, mining, and oil and gas. Following several high profile events in the oil and gas industry, notably the Macondo well kick event in the U.S., there has been a move to use HRA to model and reduce risk in future oil drilling and production activities. Organizations like the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement are adapting the risk framework of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for offshore purposes. In this paper, we present recent work to apply HRA methods to the analysis of offshore activities. We present the results of retrospective analyses using three popular HRA methods: SPAR-H, Petro-HRA, and CREAM. With the exception of Petro- HRA, these HRA methods were developed primarily for nuclear power event analysis. We present a comparison of the findings of these methods and a discussion of lessons learned in applying the methods to offshore events. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the suitability of HRA methods for oil and gas risk analysis but also to identify topics where future research would be warranted to tailor these HRA methods

Overview of a reconfigurable simulator for main control room upgrades in nuclear power plants

This paper provides background on a reconfigurable control room simulator for nuclear power plants. The main control rooms in current nuclear power plants feature analog technology that is growing obsolete. The need to upgrade control rooms serves the practical need of maintainability as well as the opportunity to implement newer digital technologies with added functionality. There currently exists no dedicated research simulator for use in human factors design and evaluation activities for nuclear power plant modernization in the U.S. The new research simulator discussed in this paper provides a test bed in which operator performance on new control room concepts can be benchmarked against existing control rooms and in which new technologies can be validated for safety and usability prior to deployment

A Review of Expertise and Judgment Processes for Risk Estimation

A major challenge of risk and reliability analysis for human errors or hardware failures is the need to enlist expert opinion in areas for which adequate operational data are not available. Experts enlisted in this capacity provide probabilistic estimates of reliability, typically comprised of a measure of central tendency and uncertainty bounds. While formal guidelines for expert elicitation are readily available, they largely fail to provide a theoretical basis for expertise and judgment. This paper reviews expertise and judgment in the context of risk analysis; overviews judgment biases, the role of training, and multivariate judgments; and provides guidance on the appropriate use of atomistic and holistic judgment processes

Meeting Human Reliability Requirements through Human Factors Design, Testing, and Modeling

In the design of novel systems, it is important for the human factors engineer to work in parallel with the human reliability analyst to arrive at the safest achievable design that meets design team safety goals and certification or regulatory requirements. This paper introduces the System Development Safety Triptych, a checklist of considerations for the interplay of human factors and human reliability through design, testing, and modeling in product development. This paper also explores three phases of safe system development, corresponding to the conception, design, and implementation of a system

Current Human Reliability Analysis Methods Applied to Computerized Procedures

Computerized procedures (CPs) are an emerging technology within nuclear power plant control rooms. While CPs have been implemented internationally in advanced control rooms, to date no US nuclear power plant has implemented CPs in its main control room (Fink et al., 2009). Yet, CPs are a reality of new plant builds and are an area of considerable interest to existing plants, which see advantages in terms of enhanced ease of use and easier records management by omitting the need for updating hardcopy procedures. The overall intent of this paper is to provide a characterization of human reliability analysis (HRA) issues for computerized procedures. It is beyond the scope of this document to propose a new HRA approach or to recommend specific methods or refinements to those methods. Rather, this paper serves as a review of current HRA as it may be used for the analysis and review of computerized procedures