This information is intended to assist in assessing the human contribution to risk, commonly known as Human Reliability Assessment (HRA). There are two (2) distinct types of HRA:
- qualitative assessments that aim to identify potential human failures and optimise the factors that may influence human performance, and
- quantitative assessments which, in addition, aim to estimate the likelihood of such failures occurring. The results of quantitative HRAs can feed into traditional engineering risk assessment tools and methodologies, such as event and fault tree analysis.
Quantifying human failures can be difficult (e.g., due to a lack of data regarding the factors that influence performance); however, the qualitative approach has significant benefits, and I will discuss this type of HRA.