Back to Basics: First Principles of HRA

Abstract

Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) continues to suffer from a myriad of technical gaps in its foundations. Core issues have been widely discussed but remain largely unaddressed, although the path taken to this point was paved with good intentions. Now, while this characterization may seem dramatic it is not intended to throw doubt onto HRA as a discipline or to diminish the value it has on increasing safety and resilience in nuclear power. Rather, it is intended to communicate that HRA has some serious challenges and is desperately in need of a critical evaluation. To quote Dougherty [1], “the misrepresentations that will undoubtedly arise may serve to provoke the necessary creativity.” What bears noting is that in the last thirty years since Alan Swain declared that “no adequate HRA had ever been done,” there has been little effort to correct the issues he highlighted. Human factors practice is still poorly implemented, many complex systems are fundamentally incompatible with reliable human performance, and there remains poor foundational support for many of the assumptions within HRA. We propose three categories of issues in HRA, philosophical, theoretical, and empirical and potential solutions to these issues.