Development and Verification of a New Approach for Operator Action Analysis

Systematic approach to incorporate human factors into a process plant design

“…Several techniques have been developed for HF analysis including the quantitative and qualitative issues. The quantitative HF analysis methods are taking human beings as one part of the system which either functions or fails [3]. They do not pay attention to the underlying causes of an error.…”

“…Unfortunately, only a small number of techniques exist for this purpose, which is due to several drawbacks considered to be inadequate for analyzing the operator actions elaborately; i.e., they do not provide information about the distance between equipment that must be operated simultaneously, some of the methods do not give prediction of consequences that could arise following an error occurrence, and they do not represent both normal and abnormal conditions concurrently. For this reason, a new method to analyze operator actions was developed [3].…”

“…Such an evaluation can help in recognizing a system's strengths and weaknesses from a HF's perspective. As the influencing factors can differ broadly depending on the kind of activities performed by the operator, factors to be analyzed in the process industry were identified [3]. Based on several guidelines, regulations, and standards, the areas of the quality assessment on human and organizational factors in the process industry were defined [6, 7].…”

“…Because of the current lack of adequate methods, HF analysis is not widely performed in the process industry. Several HF techniques developed in the process industry were examined regarding their practical applicability and were unfortunately proved to be unsuitable for an elaborate HF analysis [3]. Therefore, a new approach was developed, which provides a systematic way in performing a qualitative HF analysis to achieve a safer operation and decrease the number of human failure events.…”

“…Unrealistic demands on operators must be recognized and avoided through an adequate system configuration. The new method for operator action analysis [3] provides a way to identify and evaluate operator workload during task performance, possible errors, and consequences in both normal and abnormal operation. In addition, the method includes an evaluation on how all performance influencing factors (PIFs) are affecting humans during task performance.…”