The fatal explosion at the Texas City Refinery in March 2005, highlights the importance of comprehensively addressing human factors during project design to avoid catastrophic consequences. While many factors contributed to varying degrees to cause the explosion, BP's response to the explosion included developing a comprehensive procedure and supporting guidance on the integration of human factors with project engineering processes. Other sources of such guidance do exist but they are generic in that they do not map onto an engineering or systems development process. Or they are specific only to certain stages of development. This work is original in its attempt to create a comprehensive solution to oil and gas projects' development cycle, and in trying to map this onto an operating Company's management systems. This paper reports on the work undertaken to develop a human factors integration procedure for BP's projects and operational management. It describes the requirements gathering and drafting phases of the work, and shows how the description of human factors practices has been tailored to the organisation's established engineering and technical safety management systems. The human factors process model has been validated with stakeholders throughout the organisation and in support of a major project. The results of these validation activities are reported here. Introduction The need to incorporate human factors into oil and gas industry practices has been recognised for some time. Indeed, one of our authors was involved with the development of a human factors strategy in support of process systems' engineering (see Elder, Hamilton, & Martin, 2001) In 2002 the HSE published a research report on human factors integration for the onshore and offshore industries. The work was based on the experience of human factors integration gained within the defence industry. It successfully expressed the user centred design principles set out in ISO 13407, in a way that could be applied to oil and gas projects (Widdowson and Carr, 2002). More recently, in the UK the HSE's regulatory regime for the control of major accident hazards (See HSE COMAH) has been revised. Following the June 2005 amendments, all COMAH sites, whether top or lower tier, are required to prepare a major accident prevention policy (MAPP). Human factors are seen as a significant part of major accident causation, and the management of human factors risks as an essential part of major accident control. As such the MAPP must acknowledge the sources of human factors risk, their contribution to accident risk and the strategies required to manage them. The HSE provides guidance on the required coverage and technical criteria for human factors assessment within the safety report (see HSE, 2006a). In addition the revised Assessment Principles for Offshore Safety Case (HSE, 2006b) now contains Principle 8, which states that: The major accident risk evaluation should take account of human factors. This includes the following requirements:The risk evaluation should consider people as both a key element in safe operation and as a potential cause of major accidents and their escalation.Where lines of defence against major hazards and escalation are presented, the role of the human element in these should be made clear and a demonstration provided that this can be delivered reliably when required.Safety critical tasks should be analysed to demonstrate that task performance could be delivered to the specified performance when required. This demonstration should draw upon recognised good practice in human factors.
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