Citation:
Simon French, Tim Bedford, Simon J.T. Pollard, Emma Soane, Human reliability analysis: A critique and review for managers, Safety Science, Volume 49, Issue 6, July 2011, Pages 753-763.
Abstract:
In running our increasingly complex business systems, formal risk analyses and
risk management techniques are becoming a more important part of a manager's
tool-kit. Moreover, it is also becoming apparent that human behaviour is often a
root or significant contributing cause of system failure. This latter
observation is not novel; for more than 30 years it has been recognised that the
role of human operations in safety critical systems is so important that they
should be explicitly modelled as part of the risk assessment of plant
operations. This has led to the development of a range of methods under the
general heading of human reliability analysis (HRA) to account for the effects
of human error in risk and reliability analysis. The modelling approaches used
in HRA, however, tend to be focussed on easily describable sequential, generally
low-level tasks, which are not the main source of systemic errors. Moreover,
they focus on errors rather than the effects of all forms of human behaviour. In
this paper we review and discuss HRA methodologies, arguing that there is a need
for considerable further research and development before they meet the needs of
modern risk and reliability analyses and are able to provide managers with the
guidance they need to manage complex systems safely. We provide some suggestions
for how work in this area should develop.
