A Conceptual Model of Human Behaviour in Socio-technical Systems

The growing percentage of incidents connected with human error in several industries has led to investigate the factors influencing failures, so that many methods, the so-called Human Reliability Analysis methods, have been developed in order to quantify the human error probabilities. According to the needs of the last generation of the above mentioned methods (i.e. dynamic HRA methods), in order to overcome the lack into modelling the dynamic nature of human performance, this paper focuses on System Dynamics approach to highlight the relationships among the factors that influence human performance. Starting from a literature review on human error taxonomy, a Causal Loop Diagram is proposed to represent in a graphical fashion the interrelations between the variables which most influence and are influenced by human behaviour within a socio-technical system.

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