Evaluation of the Validity of Four Hazard Identification Methods with Event Descriptions

摘要

A new method for evaluating the validity of safety analysis with incident and accident descriptions was investigated and applied to some common approaches to safety analysis. Descriptions of disturbances and accidents were collected in seven Finnish process plants. Based on the 51 incident descriptions recorded and complementary material (18 incidents) collected from the FACTS-data bank, four methods were evaluated: hazard and operability study; action error analysis; failure mode and effect analysis; and, management oversight and risk tree analysis. Results indicate an overall validity of 0.55 for the methods; the validity in the physical subsystem was 0.66, while the validity in the human and information subsystems were 0.49 and 0.33, respectively. The most problematic contributors to identify were maintenance errors, misdiagnoses of process state, and design errors.