The reliability of the human factor

It seems that ironically, as the complexity of products and electronic methods of protection and control increase, the systems aren't less vulnerable to errors, especially to human ones. Major events, some with catastrophic consequences, are becoming more common, most likely due to human errors (the sinking of Titanic, the 1965 blackout in United States, an important industrial catastrophe in Bhopal India, the Chernobyl nuclear accident or the Costa-Concordia sinking) For decades, the methods of reliability assessment and design have focused on technical factors. The present paper aims to identify a statistical model able to capture, more accurately, the overall performance of human errors in the human-machine system. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.