ABSTRACT
Increasing demands are being placed on modem manufacturing systems, for flexibility, higher quality standards, and higher innovative capacities, all of which strongly emphasise the need for high levels of overall system reliability. This paper focuses on the reliability of the people in a manufacturing system and refers to the concept of 'disturbance5 as a means for assessment of the influence of human reliability in system performance. An analytical framework is proposed - human error and disturbance occurrence in manufacturing systems (HEDOMS) which integrates various human reliability concepts and has been developed as a set of tools for practical disturbance analysis and identification and reduction of potential for human error. Modules 1 and 2 (for disturbance and human error analysis) of the toolkit are briefly described and some of the main ideas regarding the development of module 3 (identification of error and disturbance reduction measures) are outlined.
