A fuzzy Bayesian network approach to improve the quantification of organizational influences in HRA frameworks

Organizational factors are the major root causes of human errors, while there have been no formal causal model of human behavior to model the effects of organizational factors on human reliability. The purpose of this paper is to develop a fuzzy Bayesian network (BN) approach to improve the quantification of organizational influences in HRA (human reliability analysis) frameworks. Firstly, a conceptual causal framework is built to analyze the causal relationships between organizational factors and human reliability or human error. Then, the probability inference model for HRA is built by combining the conceptual causal framework with BN to implement causal and diagnostic inference. Finally, a case example is presented to demonstrate the specific application of the proposed methodology. The results show that the proposed methodology of combining the conceptual causal model with BN approach can not only qualitatively model the causal relationships between organizational factors and human reliability but also can quantitatively measure human operational reliability, and identify the most likely root causes or the prioritization of root causes causing human error.

► Developing a multi-level causal model to simulate the causal relationships to consider human reliability in certain context. ► Establishing a fuzzy BN network approach to improve the quantification of organizational influences in HRA frameworks. ► Case study is presented.