Human and Organizational Factors Assessment and Their Use As Potential Safety Barriers

This paper presents a statistical analysis of past accidents occurred between 1983 - 2013 reported to European Major Accidental Reporting System (EMARS) across seven industries for human and organizational factor (HOF) assessment. The main purpose of this analysis is to provide guidelines for the HOF analysis and its quantification in chemical process industries. Five identified organizational factors have been chosen as performance shaping factors for human actions/interventions which are quantified using analysis of past accidents. The relation between organizational and human factors is developed and quantified using a newly developed methodology "Method for Error Deduction and Incident Analysis (MEDIA)". At the same time, maintenance operations and their potential influence on safety of plant is also considered.

A case study is carried out for a pig launcher that is widely used in oil and gas facilities during pigging operations. Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) approach is used to identify the potentially critical human actions/ interventions based on guided brainstorming. After that, these identified actions/ interventions analyzed using conventional FMECA approach and MEDIA. FMECA can provides a qualitative results, while MEDIA can provides quantitative results and also demonstrates the influence of an organization on human reliability.