ABSTRACT
Process charting techniques have since been used in a number of different domains to provide graphical representations of tasks or sequences of activity. A number of variations on process charting techniques exist, including techniques used to represent operator decisions and the causes of hardware and human failures. Process charting techniques have been used in a variety of domains in order to understand, evaluate and represent the human and system aspects of a task, including the nuclear, petrochemical, aviation, maritime, railway and air traffic control domains. Originally used in system reliability analysis, it can also be applied to human operations to investigate possible actions and their consequences. A fault tree is a tree-like diagram, which defines the failure event and displays the possible causes in terms of hardware failure or human error. Although typically used to evaluate events retrospectively, fault trees can be used at any stage in the system life-cycle to predict failure events and their causes.
