A Discourse on the Incorporation of Organizational Factors into Probabilistic Risk Assessment: Key Questions and Categorical Review

Abstract

This paper presents a discourse on the incorporation of organizational factors into Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA)/Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA), a topic of debate since the 1980s that has spurred discussions among industry, regulatory agencies, and the research community. The main contributions of this paper include (1) identifying the four key open questions associated with this topic; (2) framing ongoing debates by considering differing perspectives around each question; (3) offering a categorical review of existing studies on this topic to justify the selection of each question and to analyze the challenges related to each perspective; and (4) highlighting the directions of research required to reach a final resolution for each question. The four key questions are: (I) how significant is the contribution of organizational factors to accidents and incidents? (II) how critical, with respect to improving risk assessment, is the explicit incorporation of organizational factors into PRA? (III) what theoretical bases are needed for explicit This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. incorporation of organizational factors into PRA? and (IV) what methodological bases are needed for the explicit incorporation of organizational factors into PRA? Questions I and II mainly analyze PRA literature from the nuclear domain. For Questions III and IV, a broader review and categorization is conducted of those existing cross-disciplinary studies which have evaluated the effects of organizational factors on safety (not solely PRA-based) to shed more light on future research needs.

Interactions among the human and organizational factors within the public sector regarding epidemic prevention and control

“…In this respect, this study provides a deeper and broader understanding of the interactions among HOFs within the public sector, and thereby a more accurate assessment of risk propagation in EPC system and the root causes of its failure. Furthermore, the interaction‐based and expert judgment‐based survey in this study diagnosed key HOFs in EPC system, which to some extent alleviates Pence and Mohaghegh's (2020) concern about the difficulty of risk importance measurement of organizational factors.…”

“…First, this study helps shed light on the latent organizational mechanisms behind epidemic governance. Despite the increasing emphasis on the explicit incorporation of organizational factors into risk/safety assessment (Pence et al., 2020; Pence & Mohaghegh, 2020), little literature has comprehensively identified this type of factors within the key public sector regarding EPC, let alone modeled and quantified their impacts. In this study, we constructed a weighted network to investigate the impacts of the human and organizational risks emerging from the key public sector on the complex interconnected EPC system.…”

“…In most countries, the formulation and implementation of countermeasures against epidemics are mainly undertaken by the public sector (Dai et al., 2020; Zhao et al., 2020). As the public sector depends heavily on the ubiquitous human and organizational factors (HOFs), such factors will undoubtedly also affect EPC's efficacy to a great extent (Fu et al., 2020; Pence & Mohaghegh, 2020). Consequently, there has been a recent surge in the interest to comprehensively identify and investigate relevant HOFs (Nicola et al., 2020).…”