Abstract

Human reliability analysis (HRA) has become an increasingly important element in many industries for the purpose of risk management and major accident prevention; for example, recently to perform and maintain probabilistic risk assessments of offshore drilling activities, where human reliability plays a vital role. HRA experience studies, however, continue to warn about potential serious quality assurance issues associated with HRA methods, such as too much variability in comparable analysis results between analysts. A literature review highlights that this lack of HRA consistency can be traced in part to the HRA procedure and a lack of explicit application of task analysis relevant to a wide set of activity task requirements. As such, the need for early identification of and consistent focus on important human performance factors among analysts may suffer, and consequently, so does the ability to achieve continuous enhancements of the safety level related to offshore drilling activities. In this article, we propose a method that clarifies a drilling HRA procedure. More precisely, this article presents a novel method for the explicit integration of a generic task analysis framework into the probabilistic basis of a drilling HRA method. The method is developed and demonstrated under specific considerations of multidisciplinary task and well safety analysis, using well accident data, an HRA causal model, and principles of barrier management in offshore regulations to secure an acceptable risk level in the activities from its application.

Highlights

  • IntroductionThe main purpose of Human reliability analysis (HRA) of activities is to identify and evaluate the key human behaviour-oriented risk factors that concern major accident prevention for any operator-intensive system under different operational modes

  • Human reliability analysis (HRA) is becoming increasingly important as a tool for risk control in activities that have catastrophic potential, such as nuclear power generation and offshore drilling.The main purpose of HRA of activities is to identify and evaluate the key human behaviour-oriented risk factors that concern major accident prevention for any operator-intensive system under different operational modes

  • This section includes a discussion of a proposed task analysis method in HRA in terms of its broader application to HRA causal evaluations in the nuclear power industry HRA

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Summary

Introduction

The main purpose of HRA of activities is to identify and evaluate the key human behaviour-oriented risk factors that concern major accident prevention for any operator-intensive system under different operational modes. An offshore operating company may typically employ HRA during the planning and follow-up of drilling activities to control the blowout risk associated with interactions among service providers [1]. In this case, HRA could be considered critical to assist an operator to maintain two barriers during drilling operations [2], and thereby to provide an acceptable level of safety as stipulated by society [3]. HRA helps to identify and evaluate the influences of human and organisational factors in drilling that nowadays may be considered a prerequisite to risk management

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