Addressing the human factor in major accident risk

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Operating in today’s oil and gas industry is challenging due to sharpened focus on cost and increased demands for uptime. In addition, society has become intolerant to major accidents demanding heightened requirements for safety. This calls for an effective, holistic risk management approach where preventing major accidents is key.

Human factors is concerned with enabling safe and efficient operations by optimizing human performance in daily operations and in the face of major accident risk.

Experience has shown that the majority of major accidents can be attributed in some way to human error. Understanding the factors influencing human performance is therefore a key attribute to reducing error and increasing safety. 

Our services can help you understand how to manage the risks of human error by understanding and optimizing the contextual factors that influence human performance.

In DNV, we believe that today’s challenges can be met by taking an holistic, integrated and systematic approach to addressing the human factor in design and operations. This includes, understanding the role of the operator in major accident risk, enhancing operator competence through training and addressing organizational aspects of major accident risk.

DNV has a global network of human factors specialists across the company with wide industrial experience. We see human factors as an integral part of managing safety and risk. Although different definitions of human factors are used interchangeably (e.g., cognitive ergonomics, human factors engineering), taking a holistic and integrated approach to human performance optimization is the key to meeting demands for uptime, reducing operational costs whilst preventing the considerable cost and trauma of accidents. 

What you get

We are actively involved in all phases of the project and operations to provide;

• Analyses to identify requirements for enhanced operator performance, e.g. function analysis, task analysis, workload analysis
• Decision support for user-friendly and fault-tolerant system design
• Support in developing and reviewing human machine interfaces
• Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) methods to predict, assess, and quantify human reliability in relation to safety critical tasks
• Methods to assess human reliability in relation to major accident risk
• Tools and measurements to manage the operators’ physical working environment
• Training in major accident risk understanding and on regulatory requirements
• Assessment of the effects of organisational change
• Incident and accident investigation
• Tools to integrate Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) with HIRA studies (e.g. HAZOP, LOPA, SIL assessments, etc.)