Is Human Reliability Relevant to Human Factors?

Abstract

This paper presents a number of views from a panel discussion on the relationship between human reliability analysis (HRA) and human factors. HRA emerged concurrently with the field of human factors and now features a nearly fifty-year shared history. While built on human factors, HRA distinguished itself early on from human factors due to its emphasis on predicting human performance. While one of the major focus areas of human factors has been improving the design of novel systems to optimize human performance, HRA has largely focused on predicting human performance for as-built systems. Over time, as HRA became closely tied particularly to the nuclear energy industry, it increasingly became a field associated more with reliability engineering than human factors. Yet, the similarity to human factors has not abated, nor has the opportunity for the two fields to cooperate. Human factors research provides the empirical basis to support predicting human performance in HRA. Importantly, HRA continues to benefit human factors by providing: (1) a framework for modeling human performance, (2) an example of how a human factors discipline can be seamlessly integrated with an engineering field, and (3) insights on how predictive modeling may be used as a system design tool.