COGNITIVE HEURISTICS AND BIASES IN PROCESS CONTROL AND MAINTENANCE WORK

摘要

People are prone to use various kinds of cognitive heuristics to simplify decision makingespecially in demanding situations. Sometimes, these heuristics expose them to failures injudgement, which may lead to errors. Even though these kind of failures are also possible in processindustries, there is little research on the effect of cognitive biases on process control and maintenancework. In the present paper, we provide suggestions of how heuristics and biases may appear in thesetasks in nuclear domain. Overall, our observations suggest that operative and maintenance personnelmay be prone to commit biases also in nuclear domain.We have reviewed existing literature on the effect of cognitive biases in NPP incidents andaccidents, and we describe some of the most well-known biases and give examples of theirapplication for decision making in nuclear domain. We have also analyzed failures and problemsituations in a simulator study conducted in a Finnish NPP. A small set of failures of judgementcould be identified in which some forms of cognitive biases may have manifested themselves.The present paper is one of the first systematic reviews on effects of cognitive heuristics andbiases among operative and maintenance personnel in NPPs and ways to prevent them. Our nextstep would be to analyze more systematically a set of cognitive errors specific to operative andmaintenance activities in nuclear domain in order to identify occurrences of cognitive biases andillusions in them.