Development of a process for human reliability assessment in a defence industries context

SYSTEMS wished to upgrade its in-house human reliability assessment (HRA). It believed that soon its methods and databases would soon cease to be state-of-the-art, and it wished to upgrade both. This paper reports the initial studies defining the problem, and identifying a possible solution. This paper reports the initial studies defining the problem, and identifies a possible solution. A scoping study was undertaken within BAE SYSTEMS. Because BAE SYSTEMS has a presence in several defence sectors, this exercise produced some differing requirements, reflecting the different characteristics of the clients in the sectors. For example, for the surface ships sector, it is sufficient to use the opinions of Subject Matter Experts from the Navy; for submarines, rigorous, detailed analyses are required conforming to the tenets of the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate: Other studies into the methods currently available were undertaken. These supported the findings of Dougherty (1990) and Cacciabue (2000) and others: we are still using first-generation techniques, whereas the need is for second-generation, dynamic reliability techniques; the data on which these techniques rely is not consolidated, and have many gaps; at different stages of the design, develop and deploy process there will be a need for different HRA techniques, appropriate to the level of maturity of the product.