Modern technology has created a tendency to produce equipment and systems of greater capital cost, sophistication, complexity and capacity. The consequences of unreliable behaviour of equipment and systems have become increasingly more severe and have led to the desire for better reliability. Nowadays complex system reliability analysis is no longer restricted to the hardware aspect only, but also takes into consideration other aspects, such as reliability of the human element and that of the software. Although it was during the years of World War II that human factors began to be regarded as a somewhat distinct discipline, it was not until the late 1950s that it was clearly stated that realistic system reliability analysis must include the human aspect. Ever since the beginning of the 1960s there has been considerable growth of the published literature on the topic of human reliability. Interest in this subject has revived further because the well-publicized Three Mile Island nuclear accident was the result of hardware failures and human error. Nowadays there is a tendency to place greater emphasis on human reliability during system design. A technical professional faces inconvenience in securing information on the subject of human reliability and related areas because the information is covered in technical reviews or only briefly in some textbooks, but (to the author's best knowledge) not specifically in a single volume. This book is an attempt to fulfil! this vital need. It emphasizes concepts and avoids getting bogged down in mathematical rigor and details. Despite this, it holds great utility for persons with engineering backgrounds. At the end of each chapter, the sources of most of the materials presented are listed. This will provide a useful service to readers for further investigation, whenever it is necessary. Several examples, along with their corresponding solutions, are presented in the text to help in understanding its contents. Although the prime objective of the book is to cover human reliability, nevertheless some of the related areas are also discussed. Understanding of such areas is also quite useful in human reliability work. This text will be useful to readers such as human factor engineers and specialists, reliability and maintainability specialists, system and design engineers, industrial engineers, quality control engineers and students. The book is composed of 13 chapters. Chapter 1 briefly discusses the histories of human factors and human reliability along with selective terms and definitions. A review of the basic reliability mathematics and concepts helpful in understanding the contents of subsequent chapters is presented in chapter 2. Chapter 3 introduces the topic of human reliability. The topics of stress, mathematical modelling of human error occurrence, human performance reliability modelling in a continuous time domain and the fault-tree method are covered. Chapter 4 is completely devoted to human errors. Various aspects of human errors are discussed. Some of these are the classifications of human errors, reasons for human errors and human-error prevention methods. Six human reliability analysis methods are presented in chapter 5. Chapter 6 is concerned with the reliability evaluation of systems with human errors. It contains several Markov models. The theme of chapter 7 is human factors in maintenance and maintainability. Important aspects of both these topics are discussed. Chapter 8 deals with the important topic of human safety. Some of the subjects covered in the chapter are accident losses, reasons for accidents, accident- and error-reduction measures, safety devices and human failure modes. The important topic of human reliability data is discussed in chapter 9. This chapter addresses various important areas of the human reliability data. Human factors in quality control is the theme of chapter 10. The material covered in this chapter is concerned with management and operator-controllable errors, inspector errors, inspection-related mathematical models, and so on. Chapters 11-13 present three significant areas related to human factors, i.e., human factors in design, mathematical models and formulas and applications of human factors engineering. The material discussed in these three chapters is considered to be of significance and its knowledge is essential in human reliability work. (Author/publisher)
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