Dependence assessment in human reliability analysis under uncertain and dynamic situations

Since reliability and security of man-machine system increasingly depend on reliability of human, human reliability analysis (HRA) has attracted a lot of attention in many fields especially in nuclear engineering. Dependence assessment among human tasks is a important part in HRA which contributes to an appropriate evaluation result. Most of methods in HRA are based on experts’ opinions which are subjective and uncertain. Also, the dependence influencing factors are usually considered to be constant, which is unrealistic. In this paper, a new model based on Dempster–Shafer evidence theory (DSET) and fuzzy number is proposed to handle the dependence between two tasks in HRA under uncertain and dynamic situations. First, the dependence influencing factors are identified and the judgments on the factors are represented as basic belief assignments (BBAs). Second, the BBAs of the factors that varying with time are reconstructed based on the correction BBA derived from time value. Then, BBAs of all factors are combined to gain the fused BBA. Finally, conditional human error probability (CHEP) is derived based on the fused BBA. The proposed method can deal with uncertainties in the judgments and dynamics of the dependence influencing factors. A case study is illustrated to show the effectiveness and the flexibility of the proposed method.