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Safety, Reliability and Risk Analysis: Beyond the Horizon – Steenbergen et al. (Eds)
© 2014 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 978-1-138-00123-7
Modeling contractor and company employee behavior
in high hazard operation
Pei-Hui Lin, Daniela Hanea, Ben J.M. Ale
Safety Science, Technical University Delft, Delft, The Netherlands
ABSTRACT: The recent blow-out and subsequent environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico have
highlighted a number of serious problems in scientific thinking about safety. Risk models have generally
concentrated on technical failures, which are easier to model and for which there are more concrete data.
However, many primary cause of the disasters, such as BP’s Texas City and Deepwater Horizon, are
rooted in management decisions and organizational. Therefore, there is a strong need to develop a risk
management support tool for chemical process industries which incorporates human and organizational
factors into quantified risk models. In this paper, we model two human performance model for oil and
gas company Royal Dutch Shell. Interviews were conducted to obtain important human factors. As the
quality and operation of the management actions have important influences on human factors (e.g. safety
attitude, training), we have linked a safety management model with the human factors model and quantify
the risk implications of different management changes to prevent accidents. The methodology of integrat-
ing organisational factors into a Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) model is discussed in Lin et al. (2012).
In this paper the development and quantification of human and management factors for an international
oil company is given.
own personnel and the personnel hired through
contractors are built. The structure of the human
models and their development are described in
more detail in section 3. The influences of manage-
ment on human model are shown in section 4. This
section also discusses the influence of management
which follows with the conclusions.
2 LINKING HUMAN FACTORS IN
SAFETY BARRIERS IN THE CAUSAL
PATHWAY
Figure 1 shows a BBN for a vessel or vessel-like
equipment. All the barriers indicated have the pur-
pose of preventing a loss of containment. Barrier
failures occur when at least one out of three generic
barrier functions are broken. These functions are
1 INTRODUCTION
It is now widely acknowledged that human failure
and organizational factors are the fundamental
causes of many major accidents and incidents,
e.g. Texas City, Piper Alpha, Chernobyl. However,
introducing human factors and organizational fac-
tors into risk models is a big challenge in the cur-
rent worldwide research, mainly due to poor data
availability and the difficulty of capturing soft
variables in an appropriate and quantifiable way
(Lin, 2011). To make the human factors amena-
ble for quantification, the human factors have to
be translated into proxy quantities. How to model
the human factors and the management factors
by the proxy variables without losing their actual
influences is one of the main challenges in risk
modelling for human factors.
The objective of this paper is to incorporate
human factors into the risk assessment model of oil
and gas operations within the technical risk model
for Royal Dutch Shell. In this paper we illustrate
the quantification steps and the questions designed
for reducing the current quantification limitations
for human factors in oil industry.
Section 2 provides a brief overview of the
quantification method for human factors. Human
models for two types of people: the companies Figure 1. One layer protection system.