Assessment of HRA method predictions against operating crew performance: Part I: Study background, design and methodology
This is the first in a series of four papers document ing two large -scale human reliability analysis (HRA) empirical studies – the International HRA Empirical Study and the US HRA Empirical Study. The two studies are the first major efforts in recent years to benchmark HRA methods by comparing HRA method predictions against actual operator performance in accident scenarios simulated on nuclear power plant (NPP) simulators. When a met hod was applied by different analyst teams, the predictions of the different teams were also compared against each other. The purpose of the comparisons was to obtain insights concerning the strengths and weaknesses of the HRA methods addressed in the studies as well as the factors contributing to inter-analyst (or intra-method) variability. The background and motivation for the studies is first presented in the article. Then, the overall study design is described with a discussion on high-level tasks and participants. Next, the methodology to achieve the high-level tasks is discussed. Finally, concluding remarks are made concerning lessons learned on benchmarking HRA methods with crew performance of scenarios on NPP simulators.