Considerations for the Development of a Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) Model Oriented to the Maintenance Work Safety

Abstract

Within the field of the Industrial Technology, maintenance of facilities and equipment is considered a key issue for the productive activity, although throughout history, engineering research efforts have been oriented mostly toward design than the maintenance of the facilities. From this point of view, an important effort has been made, especially in the last two decades, to improve safety aspects related to Industrial Maintenance, from two standpoints: on one hand, maintenance guarantees a safer operation activity, and in the other hand, the accident rate in maintenance activity had to be minimized.It is commonly accepted in specialized literature that Human Error may be at the origin of around 70% of industrial accidents, and this generates a special interest in the Human Error Analysis. Certainly Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) Techniques are not anything new, we can say that since early eighties of the 20th century, a lot of methods and models have been developed, many of them with a general character, but very focused on specific fields, such as nuclear or aeronautical industry, it is mainly due to the fact that accidents in these sectors could potentially have severe consequences.The main purpose of this paper is to establish basis for a farther development of a Human Reliability Analysis Model for industrial maintenance. This works has a cross-sectoral approach, including different fields and activities, whose object is to minimize accident risks and incidents in their earliest phase. For this, an exhaustive review of the available models of Human Reliability Analysis Models in the specialized literature from the two generations developed to date has been carried out, those models has been classified according to their characteristics and their usefulness, in order to detect which aspects are appropriate to the maintenance activity. The aim is to proceed towards a generalized Human Reliability Analysis model that can be used for the evaluation of maintenance work through a wide range of activities.