Identification of Correlation among Performance Shaping Factors of SPAR-H Method

Abstract

Standardized Plant Analysis of Risk-Human reliability analysis (SPAR-H) is an internationally known and accepted human reliability analysis (HRA) method in nuclear power plants (NPPs). However, the eight performance shaping factors (PSFs) overlap, resulting in the double count or over estimation of the human error probabilities (HEPs). To improve its PSFs system, 89 human error event reports related to the operation of operators in the main control room were collected from 219 operating event reports of Chinese NPPs from 2007 to 2017. The correlation among the PSFs was then studied. Therein, three kinds of data mining methods, i.e., association rule analysis, exploratory factor analysis and Pearson correlation analysis, were used. Results show that: a. there is a significant correlation among complexity, stress/stressor, fitness for duty and available time, in which the c the complexity correlates with stress/stressor and fitness for duty, the fitness for duty correlates with stress/stressor, and the stress/stressor correlates with available time; (2) there also exists correlation among work process, procedure, ergonomics/HMI and experience/training. In the event involving the procedure, ergonomics/HMI or experience/training, work process is involved with a high probability. These findings can be used as the reference in the improvement of the PSFs system of SPAR-H and as the basis in the quantitative study of the cause-and–effect dependences among the PSFs.