ABSTRACT
With the increasing dominance of highly complex systems within the industrial setting comes a magnified concern over the role of the human component with regard to the overall safety and reliability of a complex system. Such concerns have recently been highlighted and exacerbated by major accidents for example the Kegworth air disaster whose cause is attributed to the ubiquitous term “human error”. Although in theory the likelihood of accidents of this type and scale can be reduced through the use of Human Reliability Assessment techniques, terming the cause of an accident “human error” pays little regard to the complexity of the problem facing human reliability assessors in quantifying such errors for future reference. Since the genesis of HRA in the early 1960’s, a recurrent problem has been the lack of quantitative human error data with which to either quantify directly the likelihood of human errors occurring or upon which to base flexible and generic human error quantification tools, or indeed upon which to validate such tools. The current paucity of human error data has not been for the lack of effort since there have been a number of attempts since 1962 to generate human error data bases. For a more detailed review of these databases see Taylor-Adams and Kirwan (1993).
