New success likelihood index model for large group human reliability analysis considering noncooperative behaviors and social network

Abstract

Human reliability analysis (HRA) is a systematic method to qualitatively and quantitatively assess and analyze potential human errors for enhancing the safety and reliability of complex socio-technical systems. As a representative HRA approach, the success likelihood index method (SLIM) has been widely applied to quantify the effects of performance shaping factors on human performance and derive the human error probabilities of operational tasks. The influence quantification of performance shaping factors mainly relies on experts’ subjective judgments, where conflict opinions inevitably exist because of their different knowledge and experiences. Besides, the current SLIM studies often involved a small group of experts and assumed them to be independent, which is insufficient to tackle increasingly complicated HRA problems. In this article, a large group SLIM model is developed to calculate the human error probabilities of operational tasks considering experts’ noncooperative behaviors and social relations. Specifically, a large group of experts are included to provide task state assessments under complex uncertain linguistic environment, and clustered into subgroups based on a social network analysis. Then a consensus reaching process is performed to tackle the noncooperative behaviors of experts to obtain a consensus human error probability estimation. Finally, a case study of cargo loading process is provided to illustrate the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed large group SLIM model.