Issues in the relationship of human reliability analysis to probabilistic risk assessment

The various practitioners of probabilistic risk assessment currently use several methods or variations of methods to assess the contribution of human errors to risk. Human reliability analysis is the term most commonly applied to the estimation of the occurrence of human errors. The results of these analyses must be input to other sections of the probabilistic risk assessments. The point of incorporation of these results has become a subject of contention in the field of human reliability analysis. This paper attempts to set forth some of the problems inherent in these incorporations by pointing out that those factors common or generic to probabilistic risk assessment are not necessarily the same as those common or generic to human reliability analysis