Human Factor Evaluation as a Validation of Risk Assessment

摘要

In general terms risk assessment leads to strategic safety actions: to intervene, improve, correct and control. The crucial purpose of risk assessment RA is to maintain risk under certain acceptable or tolerable values. The different nature of variables that intervene in RA, technical and non technical is usually thought of as hard and soft respectively. On the other hand modern technology has now reached a point where improved safety can only be achieved through a better understanding of human error mechanisms. Uncertainty related to human behavior is significant and is present in all activities related to engineering. It is well known that according to available statistic information and international experience the principal cause of failures is due to human errors. Based in the previous paragraph, human factor must be somehow taken into account in RA so as the outputs can represent the actual risk level. Two general alternative perspectives can be found in the bibliography. Some authors allow including human factor in the calculation algorithms and others propone to analyze them quite separate using measures of control, i.g. Quality assurance, QA strategies, in such a way that the human factor is maintained under certain values considered not influential on the results. The proposal of this paper adheres to the second option using a holistic approach based on a hierarchical scheme. Once the evaluation has been performed, the control of the process of RA can be made. The result of the human factor evaluation is a map that allows intervening in the different parts, if necessary, to improve organizational or individual matters to validate the calculation algorithms.