Computational Functional Failure Analysis to Identify Human Errors During Early Design Stages

Abstract

Detection of potential failures and human error and their propagation over time at an early design stage will help prevent system failures and adverse accidents. Hence, there is a need for a failure analysis technique that will assess potential functional/component failures, human errors, and how they propagate to affect the system overall. Prior work has introduced functional failure identification and propagation (FFIP), which considers both human error and mechanical failures and their propagation at a system level at early design stages. However, it fails to consider the specific human actions (expected or unexpected) that contributed toward the human error. In this paper, we propose a method to expand FFIP to include human action/error propagation during failure analysis so a designer can address the human errors using human factors engineering principals at early design stages. The capabilities of the proposed method is presented via a hold-up tank example, and the results are coupled with digital human modeling to demonstrate how designers can use these tools to make better design decisions before any design commitments are made.