Human Reliability Assessment: Incorporation of organizational and cultural impacts into human performance

Abstract

The starting point for this article can be summed up in two sentences – “Human reliability can be assessed and predicted” and “The safety culture impact on human reliability can by modelled by performance influencing factors”. In this paper, both points are justified before the authors address the question in the title. They recapitulate the latest developments both in the Human Reliability Assessment (HRA) and in the evaluation of safety culture. A combination of three tools (the IDHEAS method for HRA, 10 traits and 40 attributes for safety culture assessment, and the projection of results of assessment into the HRA with the use of Bayesian network models) was used in order to create a new model incorporating cultural and organizational aspects into the human reliability equation. The application of the model is illustrated by an example using the analyses available from the Tokai–Mura accident.