Human performance evaluation system

In some organizations, designated individuals have specific responsibility for eliciting detailed information from operational staff on the immediate and underlying causes of incidents. An example is the Human Performance Evaluation System (HPES) developed for the nuclear industry, which is described in Bishop and Larhette (1988). These coordinators provide a certain level of guaranteed irrununity from sanctions which allows individuals to be frank about the contributory causes that they may not be willing to discuss in an open forum. As discussed earlier, the need for this approach is a consequence of the fact that in many organizations a blame culture exists which is likely to inhibit a free flow of information about the causes of accidents. 

Human factors covers all biomedical and psychosocial considerations it includes, but is not limited to, principles and applications in the areas of human engineering, personnel selection, training, life support, job performance aids, and human performance evaluation. It is important to fully understand human factors in order to design systems that operate optimally and safely, considering the innate and error prone nature of the human operator. 

The PRA procedures guide, NUREG/ CR-23(X), partitions human reliability analysis (HRA) into four phases (Figure 4.5-1). The familiarization phase, evaluates a sequence of events to identify human actions that directly affect critical process components. From plant visits and review, this part of HRA identifies plant-specific factors that affect human performance such as good or bad procedures used in the. sequence under consideration. The familiarization phase notes items overlooked during systems evaluation. 

Delta, a commercial performance impairment testing system produced by the Essex Corporation, was derived from the Automated Portable Test System (APTS) evaluation system, which, in turn, was based on the work of the Performance Evaluation Tests for Environmental Research Program (PETER), a jointly sponsored U.S. Navy and NASA program designed to identify measures of human cognitive, perceptual, and motor abilities that would be sensitive to environmental perturbations that are associated with decrements in safety and productivity. 

The Steinmetz and Delwiche (1993) example is a Franco-American design of a system for automatic grading of cut roses. It was chosen because it uses a product of considerable geometric and chromatic complexity and variability but that is instantly recognizible and is likely to be well known to readers from different industries. In fact, a human grading was used to develop the test batches required for performance evaluation of the system. A second consideration was that the paper contains some numerical evaluation of system performance. 

US NRC (2000) also raised several human performance issues associated with CBPs. The issues are as follows methodological and criterion requirements for evaluating CBP effects, role of plant personnel in procedure management, team performance, situation awareness, response planning, and operator error level of automation of procedure functions keyhole effects and use of multiple CBP procedures CBP failure in complex situations hybrid procedure systems and specific CBP design features. 

An evaluation method to determine the probability that a system-required human action, task, or job will be successfully completed within the required time period and that no extraneous human actions detrimental to system performance will be performed. It provides quantitative estimates of human error potential due to work environment, human-machine interfaces, and required operational tasks. Such an evaluation can identify weaknesses in operator interfaces with a system, quantitatively demonstrate improvements in human interfaces, improve system evaluations by including human elements, and demonstrate quantitative prediction of human behavior. See also ATHEANA (A Technique for Human Error Analysis) Human Error Analysis. 

A final consideration in risk projection is the important role of the human in risk evaluation and projections. Overall system reliability is totally dependent on the humans who design, install, operate, and maintain the systems. The high degree of variability in both human performance and in the conditions under which human reliability data have been obtained in the past means that sophisticated analysis is necessary to obtain valid human reliability data. Such validity is necessary because these data represent as important an input to the risk projection models as the hardware, reliability data. 

In evaluating alternative recommendations for exbting systems, we can run trade-off studies just as in new system design. A significant input to the trade-off or deebion procibs is the calculation of a human performance reliability (HPR) estimate for the system as it stands, and also as it would be. under, alternative modifications. The HPR figure b also a useful input to fault tree and other analyses. 

The International Ergonomics Association promotes a systematic approach to the ergonomic process, to incorporate human factors and human performance engineering and address problems in design of machines, environments, or systems. This can improve efficiency and safety of the human-machine relationship. The basic steps in the ergonomic process include organization of the process, identification and analyzation the problem, development of a solution, implementation of the solution, and evaluation of the result. 

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