Human factors consider how effectively and safely personnel interact with processes. It can cover a variety of issues, from facility design to procedures to overall management systems. In order to minimize human factors as potential causes for incidents, the causal relationship of human factors to safety incidents must be understood. An examination of previous incidents and incident investigations can provide valuable insight into the types of human factors that most often contribute to human error and, ultimately, to loss events.
The contribution of human factors to previous incidents in the U.S. petroleum refining industy are described in this paper. First, the data collection effort, which resulted in the documentation of over 130 incidents that occurred during the past 8 years, is examined. Next, the analysis approach is discussed, including a description of the characterization scheme used to identify cause‐contribution factors with specific incidents. Lastly, the results of the analysis are presented and valuable insights into the most common contributors are discussed.
Many traditional methods for assessing Safety Instrumented Systems (SISs) focus on controlling individual hazards on a scenario-by-scenario basis. In these existing approaches, engineers use a hazard analysis, or other form of risk assessment, to evaluate each potential accident scenario to determine the need for a SIS. While comprehensive, such methods can result in more SISs being defined than are necessary.
This paper describes an approach for SISs using existing hazard analysis data from a new perspective. The approach goes beyond traditional scenario-by-scenario methods by explicitly considering the process as a whole. A major benefit is the potential to optimize resources by identifying the minimum set of SISs required to address all the hazards present in the process. Hence, this method can reduce capital expenditures, as well as testing and inspection requirements. This paper discusses the practicalities of taking a global perspective of a process in defining SIS requirements. Additionally, the concept of Importance Measures, used for prioritizing efforts to control and reduce risk, is extended to prioritizing and optimizing SIS selection from a risk-based perspective.
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