ABSTRACT
The human reliability assessment (HRA) method offers a useful overall approach to modelling the degree of human impact on systems in a system context. And this approach could easily, moreover, be extended to other spheres of human involvement. There are sufficient tools available for assessing many, if not most, human-error scenarios and contributions to the given level of risk. These tools fall into the reasonably simple framework that is the HRA process. The HRA approach still requires significant amounts of skill and judgement on the part of the individual assessor, and there is still no substitute for experience. In this way, HRA is still as much an art as a science, though not necessarily a difficult art to learn. On the theoretical-and empirical-validation front, HRAs have a fair way to go. Nevertheless, HRA methods look better when seen in an applied setting than they do in a theoretical one.
