Designing for Human Reliability: Human Factors Engineering in the Oil, Gas, and Process Industries

Industry underestimates the extent to which behaviour at work is influenced by the design of the working environment. Designing for Human Reliability argues that greater awareness of the contribution of design to human error can significantly enhance HSE performance and improve return on investment. Illustrated with many examples, Designing for Human Reliability explores why work systems are designed and implemented such that "design-induced human error" becomes more-or-less inevitable. McLeod demonstrates how well understood psychological processes can lead people to make decisions and to take actions that otherwise seem impossible to understand. Designing for Human Reliability sets out thirteen key elements to deliver the levels of human reliability expected to achieve the return on investment sought when decisions are made to invest in projects. And it demonstrates how investigation of the human contribution to incidents can be improved by focusing on what companies expected and intended when they chose to rely on human performance as a barrier, or control, against incidents.

Recognise some ‘hard truths’ of human performance and learn about the importance of applying the principles of Human Factors Engineering on capital projectsLearn from analysis of real-world incidents how differences between ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ styles of thinking can lead to human error in industrial processesLearn how controls and barrier against major incidents that rely on human performance can be strengthened throughout the design and development of assets and equipment

1: Introduction

Part 1: Local Rationality at the Formosa Plastics Corporation 2: The Incident 3: Making Sense of Formosa

Part 2: The Scope and Value of Human Factors Engineering 4: An Introduction to HFE 5: Costs and Benefits 6: Hard Truths and Principles of Human Factors Engineering 7: Critical Tasks 8: HFE and Weak Signals 9: Automation and Supervisory Control

Part 3: Irrational People in a Rational Industry 10: The Problem with People 11: Kahneman 12: Some System 1 Biases 13: Expert Intuition and Experience 14: Summary of Part 3

Part 4: Human Factors in Barrier Thinking

Chapter 15: What did you expect? Chapter 16: Human Factors in Barrier Thinking Chapter 17: Intentions, Expectations, and Reality Chapter 18: Pro-active Operator Monitoring Chapter 19: Assuring Human Barriers 20: Reflections on Buncefield

Part 5: Improving HFE 21: HFE Implementation 22: Human Factors and Learning from Incidents 23: In Conclusion - Reflections on Local Rationality