The importance of human cognitive models in the safety analysis report of nuclear power plants - a comparative review

The chapter 18 of the Brazilian NPPs Safety Analysis Report (SAR) deals with Human Factor Engineering (HFE). The chapter evaluation is distributed among ten topics. One of them, the HRA (Human Reliability Analysis) becomes the central subject of the whole analysis, generating information to the other topics, as for example, high risk operational critical sequences. The HRA methods used in the past concerned the approach of modeling the human being as a component (hardware), based in a failure or success bivalent logic. In the last ten years, several human cognitive models were developed to be used in the nuclear field as well as in the conventional industry, mainly in the military aviation. In this paper, we describe their main features, comparing some models to each other, with the main purpose of determining the minimal characteristics acceptable for NPPs licensing, being part of these cognitive models, to be used mainly in the evaluation of HRAs from SARs in the NPPs. (author). 10 refs