Addressing Human Factor in Civil Engineering Using a Holistic Fuzzy Approach

摘要

Engineering systems comprise different kind of components. In one hand typical technological elements well known in the profession and in the other, people involved in all activities from design to decommission. Sometimes the first are thought of as embedded in the second, the so called Human Factor (HF), on which they depend. In addition, available statistics information shows that most engineering failures are caused by HF. Based on this it seems to be restrictive to talk of failures in engineering systems purely in technical terms. Technical and not technical elements differ from each other in nature and thus have different type of associated uncertainties. In modeling the first ones, the stochastic, probabilistic techniques have demonstrated to be powerful and valid tools. Nevertheless HF characteristics which are epistemic need an alternative approach to be included as they are qualified rather than quantified. In fact the idea is to keep HF under acceptable levels replacing the concept of solution by control. A holistic approach based on fuzzy logic is presented in this paper to model control on HF. Fuzzy logic allows including not only subjective and objective data but imprecise information as propositions under this perspective may have different degrees of truth. In this way decision makers can count with more solid basis to guide their future actions.