A compound methodology to assess the impact of human and organizational factors impact on the risk level of hazardous industrial plants

This paper presents a compound methodology devised to relate Human and Organizational Factors (HOFs) to operators’ response time in critical operations within hazardous industrial plants. The methodology has been based on a sensitivity analysis of the nine “families” of the Common Performance Conditions (CPCs), as defined in the CREAM technique, in order to verify and rank their influence on the operators’ response time. To prove the methodology, a series of pilot experiments have been designed and performed so that human response is evaluated in a Virtual Environment (VE) reproducing the control room and a specific plant section. This environment enables the analyst controlling the simulation to perform the sensitivity analysis acting through a supervisory station and manipulating the control functions in order to vary each CPC rate around its nominal value. Experiments were run with the variation of one CPC at a time aiming at the detection and containment operation of a gas leakage in a pressure-reduction NG terminal. The whole case study has been run within the framework of the VIRTHUALIS EU project.