• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.1
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• pp.87-100
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• 2020

Performance shaping factors (PSFs) in a human reliability analysis (HRA) are one that may influence human performance in a task. Most currently applicable HRA methods for nuclear power plants (NPPs) use PSFs to highlight human error contributors and to adjust basic human error probabilities (HEPs) that assume nominal conditions of NPPs. Thus far, the effects of PSFs have been treated independently. However, many studies in the fields of psychology and human factors revealed that there may be relationships between PSFs. Therefore, the inter-relationships between PSFs need to be studied to better reflect their effects on operator errors. This study investigates these inter-relationships using two data sources and also suggests a context-based approach to treat the inter-relationships between PSFs. Correlation and factor analyses are performed to investigate the relationship between PSFs. The data sources are event reports of unexpected reactor trips in Korea and an experiment conducted in a simulator featuring a digital control room. Thereafter, context-based approaches based on the result of factor analysis are suggested and the feasibility of the grouped PSFs being treated as a new factor to estimate HEPs is examined using the experimental data.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.68-75
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• 2014

It is necessary to control and evaluate human factors to reduce economic loss by major accident in toxic gas facilities. Conventional works to evaluate hazards have been focused on mechanical and systematic failure, while only a little works have been studied on managing human errors. In this work, a classification system of performance shaping factor (PSF) was suggested to consist human error in managing accident in the toxic gas facilities. Four types of PSFs (human, system, task characteristics, and task environment) were collected, reviewed, and analyzed to be categorized selected according their characteristics of situational, task, and environmental parameters. The PSFs were further modified to set up PSF systems adequate to evaluate human error, and the proposed system to consist PSFs to evaluate human error was further studied through accident analysis in toxic gas facilities.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.41-48
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• 2008

Enhanced machine reliability has dramatically reduced the rate and number of railway accidents but for further reduction human error should be considered together that accounts for about 20% of the accidents. Therefore, the objective of this study was to suggest a new taxonomy of performance shaping factors (PSFs) that could be utilized to identify the causes of a human error associated with railway accidents. Four categories of human factor, task factor, environment factor, and organization factor and 14 sub-categories of physical state, psychological state, knowledge/experience/ability, information/communication, regulation/procedure, specific character of task, infrastructure, device/MMI, working environment, external environment, education, direction/management, system/atmosphere, and welfare/opportunity along with 131 specific factors was suggested by carefully reviewing 8 representative published taxonomy of Casualty Analysis Methodology for Maritime Operations (CASMET), Cognitive Reliability and Error Analysis Method (CREAM), Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS), Integrated Safety Investigation Methodology (ISIM), Korea-Human Performance Enhancement System (K-HPES), Rail safety and Standards Board (RSSB), $TapRoot^{(R)}$, and Technique for Retrospective and Predictive Analysis of Cognitive Errors (TRACEr). Then these were applied to the case of the railway accident occurred between Komo and Kyungsan stations in 2003 for verification. Both cause decision chart and why-because tree were developed and modified to aid the analyst to find causal factors from the suggested taxonomy. The taxonomy was well suited so that eight causes were found to explain the driver's error in the accident. The taxonomy of PSFs suggested in this study could cover from latent factors to direct causes of human errors related with railway accidents with systematic categorization.

• Proceedings of the Safety Management and Science Conference
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• 2008.11a
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• pp.303-316
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• 2008

For the past 25 years, Korean semiconductor has experienced enormous growth to be the highest production country in the world. Semiconductor industry is very time sensitive and driven by technology and process, and requires 24-hour full operation. The environment includes many different types of equipment, utilities, different gases and toxic chemicals as well as high voltage electricity. We have performed a survey with 3-shift engineers and workers in one line. The content of the questionnaire was about the correlation between fatigue and performance shaping factor (work type and work ability), and as a result we were able to deduce the correlation, p-value and the pattern of scatter plot. The shape of the model was made of 4 blocks for fatigue, 5 blocks for work type and 5 blocks for work ability, i. e. 14 blocks in total. As a conclusion to this findings, there was a correlation between fatigue and work type and work ability specifically in semiconductor industry, and we need some effort to reduce this.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.7 no.2 s.19
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• pp.42-47
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• 2003

To prevent major accident from toxic gas release, explosion, or fire in chemical processes, it needs dynamic control of human error with mechanical failure. Although most of major accidents occur with a coupling of human error and mechanical failure, numbers of researches have studied human error and mechanical reliability independently, but no where cross each other, to reduce the risk in the process. This work focuses on the coincidence of human error and mechanical failure for management of human error, and on some important performance shaping factors to propose a method for improving safety effectively of the process industries.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.151-164
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• 2013

A key input for the assessment of Human Error Probabilities (HEPs) with Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) methods is the evaluation of the factors influencing the human performance (often referred to as Performance Shaping Factors, PSFs). In general, the definition of these factors and the supporting guidance are such that their evaluation involves significant subjectivity. This affects the repeatability of HRA results as well as the collection of HRA data for model construction and verification. In this context, the present paper considers the TAsk COMplexity (TACOM) measure, developed by one of the authors to quantify the complexity of procedure-guided tasks (by the operating crew of nuclear power plants in emergency situations), and evaluates its use to represent (objectively and quantitatively) task complexity issues relevant to HRA methods. In particular, TACOM scores are calculated for five Human Failure Events (HFEs) for which empirical evidence on the HEPs (albeit with large uncertainty) and influencing factors are available - from the International HRA Empirical Study. The empirical evaluation has shown promising results. The TACOM score increases as the empirical HEP of the selected HFEs increases. Except for one case, TACOM scores are well distinguished if related to different difficulty categories (e.g., "easy" vs. "somewhat difficult"), while values corresponding to tasks within the same category are very close. Despite some important limitations related to the small number of HFEs investigated and the large uncertainty in their HEPs, this paper presents one of few attempts to empirically study the effect of a performance shaping factor on the human error probability. This type of study is important to enhance the empirical basis of HRA methods, to make sure that 1) the definitions of the PSFs cover the influences important for HRA (i.e., influencing the error probability), and 2) the quantitative relationships among PSFs and error probability are adequately represented.

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.32 no.6
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• pp.535-540
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• 2013

Objective: The aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of causal links between various error causes in human error analysis. Background: As finding root causes of human error in safety-critical systems is often a cognitively demanding and time-consuming task, it is particularly necessary to develop a method for improving both the quality and efficiency of the task. Although a few methods such as CREAM have suggested causal linking between error causes as a means to enhance the quality and efficiency of human error analysis, no published research to date has evaluated the performance of the causal links. Method: The performance of the CREAM links between error causes were evaluated with 80 railway accident investigation reports from the UK. From each report, errorneous actions of operators were derived, and for each error, candidate causes were found by following the predefined links. Two measures, coverage and selectivity, were used to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the links, respectively. Results: On average, 96% of error causes actually included in the accident reports were found by following the causal links, and among the total of 121 possible error causes, the number of error causes to be examined further was reduced to one-tenth on average. As an additional result of this work, frequent error causes and frequently used links are provided. Conclusion: This result implies that the predefined causal links between error causes can significantly reduce the time and effort required to find the multiple levels of error causes and their causal relations without losing the quality of the results. Application: The CREAM links can be applied to human error analysis in any industry with minor modifications.

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.117-125
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• 2011

While human error happens repeatedly in the semiconductor industry in Korea, which has brought a tremendous loss from manpower, welfare etc., there are limitations to human error prevention activities. When a semiconductor company introduces new machines and facilities from Japan or Germany, the companies often do not consider human factors in the design. Also, semiconductor companies are so occupied with promoting increased productivity, their attention to human errors has been pushed aside. Negative aspects of technical exchange associated with safety management are one aspect of the industry's nature. A semiconductor company recently began acknowledging on the back of TQM(Total Quality Management) that human error has a decisive effect on the safety. There are a number of uncontrollable and hard to handle event sets because the nature of these events with a human error may often be threatened or very intensive. It is strongly required that systemic studies should be performed to grasp the whole picture of a current situation for hazard factors. This study aims to examine the human error approach through the case of human error prevention field activities in a semiconductor industry compared with the activities and experience in nuclear power plants.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 1999.06a
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• pp.77-80
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• 1999

This paper deals with a design of a symbol timing recovery circuit of QAM using the interpolation in AWGN channel. To reduce timing jitter and the amount of processing data, we employ MGA (Modified Gardner Algorithm) as a symbol timing error detector which is called NDA(Nondecision Directed Algorithm). We show the characteristics (S-curve and the variance) of timing error detector with the roll-off factor of a shaping filter, which are compared with GA. Also, we compare the BER curve of interpolation method with that of ideal case. The performance of the STR is shown to be close to that of ideal case. This result shows that this method can be useful to implement symbol timing recovery circuit for multi-level modulation.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Disaster Information Conference
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• 2022.10a
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• pp.227-228
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• 2022

전통적인 HRA(Human Reliability Analysis)방법은 특정 애플리케이션 또는 산업을 염두에 두고 있으며. 또한 이러한 방법은 종종 복잡하며, 시간이 많이 걸리고 적용하는 데 비용이 많이 들며 직접 비교하기에는 적합하지 않다. 제안된 HFHM(Human Factors Hazard Model: 인적 요인 위험 모델)은 기검증되고 시간 테스트를 거친 FTA(Fault Tree Analysis:결함 트리 분석)및 ETA(Event Tree Analysis:이벤트 트리 분석)의 확률 분석 도구 및 새로 개발된 HEP(Human Error Probability:인적 오류 확률)예측 도구와 통합되고, 인간과 관련된 PSF(Performance Shaping Factors:성능 형성 요인)를 중심으로 새로운 접근 방식으로 개발되었다. 인간-시스템은 상호작용으로 인한 재난사고 가능성을 모델링하는 위험분석 접근법 HFHM은 다음과 같은 상용 소프트웨어 도구 내에서 예시되고 자동화된다. HFHM에서 생성된 데이터는 SE 분석가 및 설계에 대한 표준화된 가이드로 사용될 수 있다. 본 연구에서는 인적 위험을 예측하는 이 새로운 접근 방식을 통해, 전체 시스템에 대한 포괄적인 재난안전 분석을 가능하게 한다.