ENGINEERING HUMAN BEHAVIOR: THE 'HUMAN FACTOR' IN PERFORMANCE BASED REGULATION

摘要

There is no suggestion that this paper's treatments of these three examples are definitive or exhaustive. Most of the issues in these and similar examples are well known to fire researchers, and the problem is that their cautions and limitations may not be adequately conveyed to practitioners and regulators. However regulators must make sure that engineers do not "go wrong" in using behavioral data and concepts. Regulators must be alert to the possibility of "group think" where members of a profession do not subject their assumptions to critical outside analysis. Kaprun shows the fire risk when other engineers do not understand fire, and the Comcast Center shows the risk when fire engineers do not understand human behavior. What is necessary is a regulatory structure that can set criteria that control when fire engineering as a discipline has the requisite skills to properly include human factors in performance based design. Until that time behavioral claims should be submitted to relevant disciplines to determine the suitability of the technique and the attendant uncertainties in the analysis.