Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Management PSAM 12, June 2014, Honolulu, Hawaii Qualitative Data Collection for Human Reliability Analysis in the Offshore Petroleum Industry

Effective Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) requires both a qualitative analysis of potential human errors and a quantitative assessment of the likelihood of those errors. One of the main conclusions from an International HRA Empirical Study is the importance of qualitative analysis when performing HRA. Although qualitative data collection is relatively well established for HRA in the nuclear industry, there is very little written guidance available on how to perform such data collection. Most HRA methods do not provide guidance on how to do this, even when the method specifies that this activity should be performed. In addition, HRA is still a relatively new concept in the petroleum industry and so there exists little experience in this industry of qualitative data collection for the purposes of HRA and quantification. The Petro-HRA project is funded by the Research Council of Norway and includes a workpackage to evaluate methods for qualitative data collection, with the aim of developing written guidelines for HRA analysts working in the petroleum industry. This paper describes the objectives and research approach for this workpackage, and the findings to date from interviews with HRA analysts working in the petroleum industry on the Norwegian Continental Shelf.