Technique for Early Consideration of Human Reliability: Applying a Generic Model in an Oil Tanker Operation to Study Scenarios of Collision

Abstract

In the oil sector, analysis, evaluation, and management of risk are vital, considering the accidents potential severity with respect to human life, environment and property. Since most accidents in this sector include human factors, and given the lack of suitable tools for its consideration along the systems life cycle, especially during design phase, the development of models dedicated to human factors in risk analysis is essential. In this context, a technique for early consideration of human reliability (TECHR) was designed for developing a prospective human performance model, which can be exploited in the system design phase and which can be updated along the system life cycle. TECHR is based on the use of expert opinion in relation to systems that operate or have operated in recent years to obtain estimates of the probabilities of the various types of human error which may occur during the performance of a specific action. This paper presents the application of a prospective human performance model—obtained by TECHR—in the study of an oil tanker operation, focusing on human factor quantification in scenarios of collision. In this work, the actions presented in a previous fault tree—for vessel operation—are quantified considering the mentioned model, and the results are discussed in view of the previous results of this fault tree that used the human error probabilities (HEPs) presented in the technique for human error rate prediction (THERP), allowing the comparison of the results obtained by the THERP with the results obtained by the TECHR.