Human Risk-Informed Design Framework (HURID) for integrating human factors in the design of systems and operations

Abstract

This paper presents the Human Risk-Informed Design framework (HURID). HURID facilitates the integration of human factors into the design of systems and operations, safety assessment, and regulation. The scarcity of human factors data obtained from the investigation of domain accidents/incidents and the lack of effective feedback loops from operations back to designers create challenges to making human risk-informed decisions. HURID aims to fill these gaps by providing a standardised approach for data collection and analysis, supporting operators in making the right design decisions. The framework was developed to be scalable, proportionate to the risks involved, and customisable. HURID consists of five main steps to ensure the inclusion of Human Factors in risk-informed design: 1. Understanding the Design Intent, 2. Analysis of relevant past experience, 3. Application of Human Assurance Tools and Methods, 4. Risk Modelling, and 5. Consolidation of Design Requirements. During these phases, the framework entails the use of tools such as an incident taxonomy - named SHIELD - which allows to systematically identify the Human positive and negative contributions, precursors, organisational aspects; the Human Assurance Toolkit, which includes the state-of-the-art of HF methods and tools in the context of designing/redesigning safety-critical systems or operations; and Risk Models, which are tools that represent the major accident categories and provide information about human actions and influences that affect human performance. HURID is also supported by a web-based tool, the Human Factors Compass, whose purpose is to guide the user in the application of one or more of the HURID components. The Human Factors Compass was the result of a user-centred design process that aimed to identify user requirements and then solve the main pain points for operators that are unsure as to how to integrate human factors in their day-to-day work. The paper presents an aviation case study detailing how the HURID framework supported the design team in the different design phases, to collect human data and derive design decisions.