• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.8
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• pp.2897-2904
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• 2023

The Standardized Plant Analysis Risk-Human Reliability Analysis (SPAR-H) method is a widely used method in human reliability analysis (HRA). Performance shaping factors (PSFs) refer to the factors that may influence human performance and are used to adjust nominal human error probabilities (HEPs) in SPAR-H. However, the PSFs are assumed to be independent, which is unrealistic and can lead to unreasonable estimation of HEPs. In this paper, a new method is proposed to handle the dependencies among PSFs in SPAR-H to obtain more reasonable results. Firstly, the dependencies among PSFs are analyzed by using decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method. Then, PSFs are assigned different weights according to their dependent relationships. Finally, multipliers of PSFs are modified based on the relative weights of PSFs. A case study is illustrated that the proposed method is effective in handling the dependent PSFs in SPAR-H, where the duplicate calculations of the dependent part can be reduced. The proposed method can deal with a more general situation that PSFs are dependent, and can provide more reasonable results.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.113-121
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• 1997

Human reliability attempts to make precise quantitative analyses and predictions of the performance of human-machine(or product) systems. In order to yield more precise human error analysis, precise human error probabilities(HEPs) must be used in the analysis. However, because human behavior is influenced by factors that are called performance shaping factors(PSFs), the effects of PSFs must be considered to obtain precise HEPs, These are called basic HEPs or situation-specific HEPs. This paper presents a theoretical method for obtaining basic HEPs (i.e. , considering PSFs) in quantitative human error analysis. In this method, the weight which characterizes the degree of importance of several PSFs is obtained by the analytic hierarchy process. The quality scores of PSFs in the task situation are obtained by percentile concept. These scores are used in conjunction with the relative Importance weights of PSFs to compute the composite quality percentile score of PSFs in the task situation. Then, a new mapping method of the composite quality percentile score of PSFs into a situation-specific basic HEP is proposed with a numerical example.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the ESK Conference
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• 1995.04a
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• pp.30-34
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• 1995

The operator's performance of nuclear power plants is affected by many performance shaping factors(PSF). The objective of this study is to find out the PSFs and their effect on the nuclear power plant operations. We extracted PSFs in five category, and identified the relationships between PSFs and performance using the four survey methods; literture survey, case study, video task analysis and questionnaire survey. Finally the knowledge on PSFs and their effect was represented as rule form for cognitive simulation.

• 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 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 the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.112-118
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• 1998

Human errors performed during the operations have a dominant portion of the accidents. But the systematic human error evaluation methodology universally accepted is not developed yet. One of the difficulties in performing human reliability analysis is to evaluate the performance shaping factors which represent the characteristics and the circumstances in the discriminate manner. For assessing a specific human action more exactly, it is necessary to consider all of the PSFs at the same time which make an effect on the human action. In this paper, dynamic influence diagrams are introduced to model simultaneously their effects on the specific human action. And the human actions and their subsequent PSFs are categorized and classified as the complementary works. A new human error evaluation methodology using influence diagrams is developed. This methodology involves the categorization of PSFs and the PSFs quantification. The applied analysis results for the example task are shown for representative purposes. It is shown that this approach is very flexible in that it can be applied to any kind of actions.

• Proceedings of the KSR Conference
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• 2006.11b
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• pp.1501-1507
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• 2006

The accidents are often resulted from multiple causes with hardware failure and human errors. So to ensure the safety of rail operation, human error should be prevented effectively. The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis system on factors of influencing human error in korean rail industry especially for engine driver and train despatcher. To achieve it, ESFs(error shaping factors) classification system was derived from several PSFs(performance shaping factors) classification system. Based on them, two kinds of questionnaires for engine driver and train despatcher each were developed. Then Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodology was used to evaluate what factors were critical to human error.

• 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 ESK Conference
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• 1993.10a
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• pp.21-30
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• 1993

This paper describes the development of a simulation model of nuclear power plant operators including cognitive aspects by using a network modeling soft ware, Micro-SAINT (System Analysis of Integrated Networks of Tasks) for the analysis of operator performance. Network model description based on Micro-SAINT includes tasks, resources, precedence relations among tasks, flow of information and PSFs (Performance Shaping Factors) on task performance. We have tried to evaluate the performance with several performance measures such as the number of tasks allocated, relative time presure among operators within a shift, for the selected test accident scenarior; small-break LOCA (Loss of Coolant Accident) in a PWR (Pressurized Water Reactor) type nuclear power plant.