Human and organizational factors assessment and their use as potential safety barriers

This paper presents a statistical analysis of past accidents that occurred between 1988 and 2012 reported to the European Commission's Major Accident Reporting System (eMARS) focusing on human and organizational factor (HOF) assessment. The main purpose of this analysis is to provide guidelines for the HOF analysis and its quantification for accident risk assessment in chemical process industries. In this analysis both operational and diagnostic layers are considered with respect to human actions. For the purpose of this analysis, five identified organizational factors have been selected as Performance Shaping Factors (PSF) for human actions/interventions. The SPAR- H model has been applied to evaluate the affect of PSFs on the human reliability. The overall framework has been modeled by using a newly developed approach, the Method for Error Deduction and Incident Analysis (MEDIA). In MEDIA new HOF action- based taxonomies have also been developed. By using a score method it is possible to identify the most critical PSF for human reliability, which should be improved in order to improve the overall human reliability.